OP THE
UNIVERSITY

OF

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

THE SUBSTANCE
OF GOTHIC

Six Lectures on the Development

of Architecture from

Charlemagne to

Henry Fill

GIVEN AT THE LOWELL INSTITUTE, BOSTON
IN NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER, 1916

BY

RALPH ADAMS CRAM

LITT.D., LL.D., F.A.I. A., F.R.G.S., ETC.

\

I

BOSTON
MARSHALL JONES COMPANY

MDCCCCXVII

67

Copyright,
BY MARSHALL JONES COMPANY

ytf/7 rights reserved

Published September, 1917

" <

PRINTED BY
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.

MA 440
C7

PREFACE

IN philosophical terminology every exist-
ing thing is composed of substance and acci-
dents, the first being its essential quality, the
second its visible form. Accidents may
change while the substance remains immu-
table, and the substance may change though
the accidents remain as before. Between
the cradle and the grave man goes through
a constant process of change, but that which
makes each a definite individual, marked
off from all others of his race in unique
individuality, remains a fixed and immu-
table ego, however much it may develop
and expand, or degenerate and fail. Death
itself, which destroys the accidents of
earthly housing, cannot touch the immortal
soul .or diminish its integrity, though the
visible manifestation may differ as much
from that of its earthly habitation as the
moth differs from the chrysalis or the ante-
cedent worm. So in the case of the Holy
Sacrament of the Altar, the words of con-
[v]

M668034

PREFACE

secration and the miracle that follows
thereon have no effect on the accidents of
form, shape, colour, ponderability, but the
substance has been wholly changed, and
though to the senses the wafer is still but
a white disk of unleavened bread, the wine
but the fermented juice of the grape, the
one has become, in substance, the very Body
of Christ, the other His sacred Blood.

For four centuries and more it has been
the fashion to deny this fundamental differ-
ence between substance and accidents, to
maintain that the accidents are in fact the
substance itself, and perilously to confuse,
in every category of thought and action, the
essential " thing in itself," with the casual
and transient forms of its manifestations.
The war is at the same time the penalty of
this folly and its drastic corrective. What-
ever may be its issue, one thing is sure, and
that is its operation towards breaking all
things into their component parts of inner
fact and outward appearance: its merciful
revelation of the illusory nature of the vis-
ible forms of the commonly accepted dog-
mas and axioms of four centuries, and of
the eternal verity of things long hidden
under deceitful masks, of the eternal falsity
[vi]

PREFACE

of things that had come before us in appeal-
ing and ingratiating guise.

I have called these lectures, given during
the winter of 1916-17 in the Lowell Insti-
tute course in Boston, "The Substance of
Gothic," because in them an effort is made,
though briefly and superficially, to deal
with the development of Christian archi-
tecture from Charlemagne to Henry VIII,
rather in relation to its substance than its
accidents; to consider it as a definite and
growing organism and as the exact and un-
escapable exponent of a system of life and
thought antipodal to that of the modernism
that began its final dissolution at the begin-
ning of August A.D. 1914, rather than in the
light of its accidents of form and ornament
and details of structural design. Art was
always the expression of the best in any
people and in any time, until the last gen-
eration when, if we are to retain any belief
that then there was a definite "best," we
must hold that it changed its nature and be-
came, if not the manifestation of the worst,
at least that of a very low average. During
the period with which I deal there is no
question on this point; between the fall of
Rome and the triumph of the Renaissance
[vii]

PREFACE

art of every kind was a visible setting forth
of the highest aspirations and capacities of
men, and it was even more intimately a part
of personal and communal life than ever
before. In every particular of ideal and of
execution it follows precisely from life, and
is neither to be estimated nor understood
except in its relation to this life which itself
must first be estimated and understood if its
art is to be apprehended except after a very
superficial fashion.

When, early in the last century, men
began to think back into the Middle Ages,
the approach was invariably made through
what philosophy would call the accidents
of a time and a life that had left us no more
than their superficial records. The admira-
tion that grew so rapidly was not for the
substance of Medievalism, for scholastic or
sacramental philosophy, for Catholic theol-
ogy, for communal organization on a human
scale, it was rather for the outward forms
of the several Christian arts, for the cere-
monial and the devotional material of re-
ligion, for the insubstantial residuum of an
ultra-mystical philosophy, for the poetry
and charm and pageantry of the Mediaeval
decadence. It has needed this war to drive

PREFACE

men back and beyond the form to the matter
itself, and to give them some realization of
the singular force and potency and right-
eousness of an epoch which begins now to
show itself as the best man has ever created,
and one as well that contains within itself
the solution of our manifold and tragical
difficulties, and is in fact the model whereon
we must rebuild the fabric of a destroyed
culture and civilization.

The earliest estimate, like the earliest ad-
miration for the rediscovered Gothic art,
was based on these superficial forms. For
many years Gothic architecture was re-
garded, demonstrated and restored solely
on the basis of its recorded forms, the
centring of its arches, the contours of its
mouldings, the nature and design of its or-
nament. Commentators on Gothic art pro-
duced one silly theory after another, praised
inordinately its secondary qualities, and
generally dealt with it after a purely em-
pirical fashion. Amateur architects and
builders copied its details (or satirized
them) in wood and plaster, and the re-
sults were deplorable. " Strawberry Hill
Gothic," " Carpenter's Gothic," " Church-
warden Gothic," "Victorian Gothic" (all
[ix]

PREFACE

effective titles applied by the scoffers) suf-
ficiently express the real quality of this
catastrophic product which bore no earthly
relationship to Gothic itself so far as its
substance is concerned, and only the most
distant resemblance to its forms.

Following the " enlightened amateur "
came the scholar and the archaeologist, and
recently the effort has insistently been made
to probe deeper and to determine the nature
and content of the style on a more scientific
basis. The unique and supreme organic
system of Mediaeval architecture at its best,
was discovered and analyzed, and this, ex-
pressed with great accuracy and after the
most approved " scientific method," was
brought forward as the essence and the cri-
terion of Gothic. According to the pro-
tagonists of this cult " Gothic " architecture
is that alone wherein the groined, ribbed,
pointed vault exists ; where this controls the
remainder of the organism, and where all
things develop from, or are made subservi-
ent to, this particular scheme of construc-
tion. Conversely it follows, and is so stated,
that any building where vaults of this na-
ture do not exist, or were not contemplated,
cannot be called Gothic. The consequences
[x]

PREFACE

are both complicated and (one would sup-
pose) embarrassing. A thirteenth-century
cathedral in some town in France is Gothic,
but an adjoining dwelling, built at the same
time, and perhaps by some of the cathedral
workmen, is not. Westminster Abbey is
Gothic, but Lincoln and Exeter are not, for
the vault system does not logically deter-
mine the other details. The choir of Can-
terbury is Gothic, but a parish church
constructed at the same time is not, if it
happens to have a wooden roof, or, if
vaulted, its pier sections are too large, and
its walls are thick enough to take the vault
thrusts without flying buttresses.

Of course in a way it is a quarrel over
a word. If the world wishes to adopt the
name " Gothic " and use it in the narrowly
restricted sense indicated above, very well,
only some other name must be discovered
to describe the great and comprehensive
impulse and product of which " Gothic," in
that sense, will be only a sub-species. Now
this word has been in universal use for five
hundred years to indicate not a detail (al-
beit the most important) of construction,
but the whole body of art produced during
the preceding five centuries to express the

[xi]

PREFACE

concrete civilization of Catholic Europe.
Deliberately to reverse the connotation of
the word, giving it an entirely new and
very restricted meaning, seems to me illogi-
cal, unreasonable and even puerile. It
smacks of the meticulous pedantry of nine-
teenth-century Teutonism and is on a par
with the philological testing of religious
doctrine, the psychological determination
of philosophical postulates, and the solution
of the -problem of life by the methods of a
mechanistic physiological determinism. If
the organic system of Gothic construction
deserves (as it does) a special nomencla-
ture, let us find or invent the right word,
but for the spirit and impulse, the great
body of artistic production, and specifically
the unique architecture of the Christian
Middle Ages, let us retain the venerable
word " Gothic," for all the world knows
what this indicates, even though it has a
nebulous idea of what it means.

Within the space of six lectures it is, of
course, quite impossible to do more than
indicate some few of the salient points in
the system I have tried to establish as the
one that must be developed if the architec-
ture of Medievalism is to be appreciated
[xii]

PREFACE

at its full value. All I have tried to do is
to stimulate interest in the great epoch of
Christian civilization and to deal, however
superficially, with its architectural expres-
sion as a supremely organic and living thing.
If I have succeeded in the slightest degree,
then it is possible for those who wish to
follow the subject further to find in many
volumes of scholarly and authoritative char-
acter the careful working out of the various
qualities in Mediaeval ism I have endeav-
oured to epitomize. The last decade is
notable for the books that have been written
along the lines of sympathetic, construc-
tive and stimulating interpretation of the
Middle Ages. At the head of the list I
should place without question "Mont-Saint-
Michel and Chartres," by Henry Adams
(Hough ton, Mifflin Company), and "The
Mediaeval Mind," by Henry Osborne Tay-
lor (Macmillan Company). The two
books supplement each other and should
be read together; so used, profound scholar-
ship and an almost miraculous vision meet
together and re-create Mediaevalism before
our eyes. " The Thirteenth, Greatest of
Centuries," by Dr. Walsh (Catholic Sum-
mer School Press), is also an authoritative

[ xiii ]

PREFACE

compendium of quite priceless information,
while " Reformation and Renaissance," by
J. M. Stone (E. P. Button & Company),
and " The Catholic Church, the Renais-
sance and Protestantism," by Alfred Bau-
drillart (Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner &
Co.), deal definitely with the transition
from the Middle Ages to modernism.
The great introductory essay in Montalem-
bert's " Monks of the West " still remains
the authoritative pronouncement on monas-
ticism. Political theory and practice are
clearly outlined in " Political Theories of
the Middle Ages," by Dr. Otto Gierke
(Cambridge University Press), and in "A
History of Mediaeval Political Theory," by
R. W. and A. J. Carlyle (G. P. Putnam's
Sons). For a clear and lucid statement of
Mediaeval philosophy, in concise form, I
know no better books than the two first
named, by Mr. Adams and Mr. Taylor.
Of course the works of St. Thomas Aquinas
are now fully translated and St. Bernard is
generally available. Unfortunately Hugh
of St. Victor still awaits his translator and
his commentator. There are many works
on the guilds and the industrial and eco-
nomic organization of the Middle Ages,

[xiv]

PREFACE

e.g. " Industrial and Commercial History
of England," by Thorold Rogers, " Village
Communities in the East and West," by Sir
Henry Maine, " The English Village Com-
munity," by F. Seebohm, and " English
Guilds," published by the Early English
Text Society. Two recent books, " The
Servile State," by Hilaire Belloc. (F. N.
Foulis), and "The Real Democracy," by
Mann, Sievers and Cox (Longmans, Green
& Co.), draw a striking contrast between
the Mediaeval and modern industrial sys-
tems, and as well between the guilds and
contemporary trades unionism.

Of the books dealing primarily with
architecture I should place first Arthur
Kingsley Porter's "Lombard Architecture"
(Yale University Press) and his " Me-
diaeval Architecture" (Baker & Taylor
Company) . Professor Moore's " Gothic
Architecture" (Macmillan & Company)
is direct, concise and sympathetic, though
I must dissent in toto from his limitation of
the title " Gothic " to the masonry-vaulted
structures of France. "A History of Gothic
Art in England," by Edward S. Prior
(George Bell & Sons), " Gothic Architec-
ture in England" (B. T. Batsford) and

[xv]

PREFACE

" Introduction to English Church Architec-
ture " (The Oxford University Press), both
by Francis Bond, deal admirably with
English Gothic; and Professor Lethaby's
"Westminster Abbey and the King's Crafts-
men " (E. P. Dutton) gives a vivid idea of
the methods of building during the Middle
Ages. .

Cardinal Gasquet has written brilliantly
on the later Middle Ages and the begin-
nings of the Reformation, particularly in
his " Henry VIII and the English Mon-
asteries " (John C. Nimmo), " The Eve of
the Reformation" (Putnam & Company),
and "The Old English Bible and Other
Essays" (George Bell & Son). Should
there be those who care to read more that
I have written along somewhat similar lines,
I would suggest " The Ruined Abbeys of
Great Britain " (James Pott) , " The Gothic
Quest" (Doubleday, Page & Company),
"The Ministry of Art" (Houghton, Mif-
flin Company), and "Heart of Europe"
(Charles Scribner's Sons).

Finally, for gaining something of the

wonderful spirit of Medievalism at first

hand, there remain the epics and verses of

the period in their original form, " Morte

[xvi]

PREFACE

d'Arthur," by Sir Thomas Mallory, first,
of course, with " The High History of the
Holy Grail," the latter admirably trans-
lated by Sebastian Evans (Dent & Com-
pany), and the " Song of Roland." " Ro-
mance Vision and Satire " is a collection of
translations into modern English by Miss
Jessie Weston (Hough ton, Mifflin Com-
pany) of much of the earliest English verse,
including the marvellous " Pearl," which
is one of the most beautiful poems in the
world. As translations they are far from
exact, but the original spirit is marvellously
preserved. Probably the best way to get
at " Pearl " is to read the Golancz text,
with Miss Weston's version as a "crib";
the Golancz translation is quite impossible.
Of course in the end Dante remains the
great Mediaeval synthesis, the " Divine
Comedy " standing alone in power and
beauty and exaltation — the very Middle
Ages made visible.

It is hardly necessary to say that this list
is no more exhaustive than it is erudite. I
have purposely chosen only those books that
are non-technical, easily available, and writ-
ten in English. Medievalism is the study
of a lifetime, for it is that great cycle of
[ xvif ]

PREFACE

five centuries wherein Christianity created
for itself a world as nearly as possible made
in its own image, a world that in spite of
the wars and the desecrations, the ignorance
and the barbarism and the " restorations "
of modernism has left us monuments and
records and traditions of a power and beauty
and nobility without parallel in history.
For three years the slow destruction of five
centuries has been accelerated to a degree
that passes belief, and the ruin of great art
is symbolical of the equal ruin that is
wrought in the last and lingering vestiges
of an almost forgotten Christian civiliza-
tion. If the wide desolation of war proves
but the clearing of the field for the return
of the spirit in life, and the mode of life,
that once had issue in the Gothic art of a
Catholic Europe, the price exacted from
the world will not be too great to pay for
so glorious a restoration.

RALPH ADAMS CRAM.

WHITEHALL, SUDBURY,
MASSACHUSETTS,
4th August, 1917.

[ xviii ]

CONTENTS

LECTURE PAGE

I. THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY ... i

II. THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE .... 33

III. THE GREAT AWAKENING 62

IV. THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION . . -. 94
V. THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS .... 127

VI. THE DECADENCE AND THE NEW

PAGANISM 158

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

The Substance of Gothic

LECTURE I
THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY

WE are called upon at this time to re-
estimate our philosophies, to test by newly
revealed criteria those concrete dogmas
and formulae accepted so generally and for
so long a time as axiomatic: to interpret
anew, and in the light of an impossible
catastrophe, phenomena that had taken their
places in a scheme of things that is for us
no longer definitive or even convincing.
Two years have cleft history in halves, and
once more, as so often in the past, a long
building-up of linked and sequent events
stops suddenly short, cut by a colossal sword.
A new order begins, the nature of which
we cannot definitely determine; a new
order subject to progressive revelation, and
explicit only in one thing, its difference in
every great and every little detail from all
that went before.

[i]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

These sudden severances are sufficiently
familiar to us in the past: so Hellenic
civilization was cut short that Rome might
have her day: so Rome fell and Mediter-
ranean culture yielded to the barbarism of
the North : so again this, when it had made
of itself the high expression of Christian-
ity, gave way in its turn to a new thing, the
consistent, logical, and well-rounded epi-
sode we have called Modern Civilization,
working out its destiny through the three
phases of Renaissance, Reformation, and
Revolution that it might achieve at last its
fruition through intellectualism, secular-
ism, and materialism, and in its turn break
down and disappear, to give place to that
new era the nature of which is still in the
balance, while a world in arms hammers
out its unknown future on bloody anvils
and in the shadow of unimaginable conflict.

For us, looking backward over the clearly
defined perspective of the past, it is easy to
trace the great clefts in history as they cut
like giant crevasses the rolling plateau of
life, but when a bottomless chasm suddenly
splits itself through the midst of our own
normal existence, without warning and in
violation of all personal experience, it is as
[2]

THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY

though on some summer morning the field
at the bottom of the garden disappeared,
with a crash of rending worlds, in an un-
fathomable pit, raw and horrible, that rent
itself with the speed of lightning through
well-known meadows and hills and forests,
leaving on the one side the shaken garden
on the black edge of catastrophe, on the
other all the once familiar world of cities
and of men, no longer approachable, no
longer even assured in its existence.

The war the whole world said could
never come, but the war that came never-
theless, to the confusion of human assur-
ance, means many things, most of which
are still unrevealed, but two are sufficiently
clear and they are, first: that the world after
the war will be, for good or ill, an entirely
new world; and second: that every pre-
conceived idea of the man of the nineteenth
century must now submit itself to the proc-
ess of re-estimation. All that was essen-
tially of the last epoch, i.e. from 1414 to
1914, in religion, philosophy, and the con-
duct of life, must subject itself to a new
testing, for the blast of war is purging away
the dross, and the alchemy of a world's
agony is transmuting base metal into refined
[3]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

gold. Once more we are driven back from
a world of phenomena to the everlasting
verities. If by the grace of God (and our
own humility) we are able to lay hold of
them, we have won for ourselves a new
Middle Ages, a new Renaissance ; and what
now seems the peril of a new Dark Ages
passes away.

In its essential contributions to religion,
philosophy, and the conduct of life the last
era of five centuries was, I believe, proceed-
ing on lines that were in general malefic
rather than beneficent, for it failed ignobly
in the chief object of life, which is the de-
velopment of character. Its contributions
to material wealth, to intellectual com-
petence, to mastery of the forces of nature,
to ease, luxury, manners, to physical well-
being and scientific achievement, were un-
exampled in their magnitude, but in the
concrete appreciation of these things (in
themselves so full of potency), the failure
was almost complete, and in the end the
breakdown of character has been ominous
and significant. It is true, however, that
the by-products of the process were often
of great value and these may in time be
made operative to admirable ends.
[4]

THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY

In its estimate of the past, its interpreta-
tion of history, the conclusions were as
erroneous as the method was ill-judged, and
the result was an entirely false standard of
comparative values and an almost complete
negativing of the constructive powers for
good inherent in the recorded annals of
human experience and adventure. Finally
it was an age that was responsible for the
breakdown and almost complete disappear-
ance of art as a vital force in society, a con-
dition that, we must always remember, is
unique in history. However low an art, or
all the arts, may have fallen at certain
rhythmical intervals in the past, there was
always an irreducible minimum left, a
nucleus which, as culture returned and
civilization began again, served as the little
leaven that in the end lightened the whole
lump and made possible once more a new
epoch of artistic achievement.

I wish to speak to you during this course
of lectures of one of the greatest of all the
arts as .it ran its course from the time of its
recovery in the west under Charlemagne
to its transformation at the time of the
Renaissance, the last episode occurring in
England at the end of the reign of Henry
[5]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

VIII — a period of seven centuries which
exactly covers the era of specifically Chris-
tian civilization in Europe. I wish to do
this partly because architecture is the most
human and general of all the arts and one
which exerts its beneficent influence most
widely; partly because it was the first of
the arts to break down and disappear in the
nineteenth century, maintaining itself since
then only as a wistful and yet ardent effort
at premeditated recovery; partly because
the nineteenth century efforts at a critical
and philosophical estimate of this particu-
larly significant era of architecture seem to
me peculiarly disastrous, in that they have
resulted either in very erroneous conclusions
as to the art itself and its position relative
to the other phases of the same art, or in
a method of estimate that eliminated all
the inner and essential qualities that gave
the architecture of this time its unique
claim on a lasting admiration, and its pe-
culiar significance for us of this day and
generation.

Two things may happen to art: trans-
formation in form and transformation in
content. The first is a more or less regular
process operating, as does all human de-
[6]

THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY

velopment, physical, mental, and spiritual,
not by steady progression, or by spiral ascen-
sion, as was once pleasantly feigned by the
evolutionists of the nineteenth century, but
by sudden and almost instantaneous leaps
both forward and backward, with long fol-
lowing periods either of slow progression
or of equally slow degeneration. " Catas-
trophic " is a word that may be used in
opposition to the old and no longer credible
" evolutionary," to express the sudden and
even violent changes in direction and varia-
tions in impulsive force that, acting in
obedience to a mysterious stimulus, the
source of which science cannot determine,
initiate those changes in species and those
rhythmical eras in progress and retrogres-
sion that determine human life while they
baffle all mechanistic systems of thought
and become the nemesis of " the scientific
method." These violent actions and reac-
tions are very evident in all the arts and they
determine those stylistic changes that give it
so much of its intense vitality and make it
so exactly an expression of life itself. Such
was the revolution effected in fifty years
when the Romanesque of the Normans gave
place to the Gothic of the Franks, or that
[7]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

other of an equal period of time, though
varying in date as between one race and an-
other, whereby Mediaeval art became the
art of the Renaissance. Transformation in
content is a different thing altogether: it
cannot be called periodic for it has hap-
pened only once, and that so recently that
the event is almost within our own memory.
However great the transformations in
form that have occurred from time to time
in the past, they have never altered the con-
tent of art itself, which has always remained
a perfectly definite thing, an inalienable
heritage of man, working within certain
clearly circumscribed lines, in accordance
with an unchanging method, toward an un-
varying end. It has presupposed the exist-
ence of beauty, relative at first but absolute
in fact, and susceptible always, in its abso-
lute form, of approximation and, though
rarely, of achievement. This beauty — of
form, line, colour, chiaroscuro, tone, mel-
ody, harmony, rhythm — has been desirable
in itself, and because of its power of sensu-
ous delight, but even more as a means of
expressing symbolically, and therefore sac-
ramentally, those spiritual adventures, ex-
periences, and achievements which tran-
[8]

THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY

scend the sphere of the physical and the
intellectual, and therefore can be expressed
only after a symbolical or sacramental
fashion. In other words beauty, which is
the vehicle of art, may be, and has been,
used for the expression for man, and from
one to another, of those highest things of
life and experience, which are, by their
very nature, unsusceptible of other mani-
festation.

Now this beauty is not, either as beauty
or as a mode of expression, a matter of per-
sonal idiosyncrasy. Specific individuals,
sometimes called artists, precipitate it, give
it form, infuse it with an element of their
own personality, and shape it in the con-
crete through power of craftsmanship, in
them more highly developed than amongst
their fellows. This does not make the art
their own: the beauty with which they deal
is not the emanation of their own idiosyn-
crasies, it is as universal and immutable as
right and wrong or the law of gravitation.
The artist has a certain sensitiveness to
beauty just as others are sensitive to phil-
osophical, mathematical, or mechanical
stimuli, therefore he can isolate this
beauty better than another. The artist is
[9]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

a trained, exquisite, and competent crafts-
man in stone, wood, marble, pigments,
musical notes, what you will ; working with
ardour and devotion in accordance with the
slowly developed laws of his particular
craft, therefore able to do what others can-
not do. The artist contributes an element
of his own personality, so bringing his art
down to earth, making it human, and vital-
izing it with personality; giving it distinc-
tion, in other words. Yet all this does not
make the art his own, for unless there is be-
hind him a communal self-consciousness,
unless the air is quick with impulses and
desires of the whole people eager for the
expression of their own spiritual experi-
ences and emotions, or at the least for the
visible manifestation of that beauty in which
they themselves can find pleasure and con-
tent, then the art of the individual, how-
ever great he may be, is a fond thing, vainly
imagined, and no part of any life save only
his own. Until the last hundred years, or
even less, the artist was a mouthpiece and a
servant, though increasingly laggard in his
service. He is now a rebel and an outlaw,
and though he himself may be a greater
artist than his forebears, his place in society
[10]

THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY

is fundamentally different. Under these
conditions he cannot prolong the succession,
and becomes the last of his race.

This change from universal art to pe-
culiar art has actually taken place within
the century, and transformation in content
has been effected, for the first time in his-
tory. Within twenty years the inevitable
result has shown itself, and the personal,
idiosyncratic art which, through a number
of very great geniuses at the end of the last
century, deceived us by its competence into
the belief that art had been born again (or
was still continuing) has passed, and we
are now confronted by certain anomalous
products, in all the arts, which are not
art at all but the mouthings of anarchy,
the pathological reactions of a spiritual
degeneration now in the last stages of its
progress.

It is significant that this phenomenon
should synchronize exactly with the reveal-
ing breakdown of what is known as modern
civilization. This civilization proceeded to
its supreme achievement through four cen-
turies of cumulative development and ever
accelerating momentum, cresting at last in
the second decade of the twentieth century
[ii]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

only to break as a wave breaks, and fall in
destroying dissolution. During the same
period the fate of art was being accom-
plished and it is now involved in the same
ruin. That this is not a final estate we must
all be persuaded. Nothing exactly like it
has ever happened before, it is true, but
nothing even remotely like modern civiliza-
tion has ever happened before. From time
to time under the racking shock of dis-
appointment, disillusionment, and vanity
wounded to death; under the staggering
horrors of the piling of a Pelion of human
agony on the Ossa of human infamy, we
doubt if this is not indeed the end of the
world, the preliminary skirmish of Arma-
geddon. For those at least who hold to
their faith in Christianity this natural fear
breaks down under a resurgent faith and
they are able to look beyond catastrophe to
a consequent regeneration, so believing that
once more the sane sequence of life will be
re-established after the great readjustment
has been accomplished.

This readjustment, which will affect
every category of life, involves a new scru-
tiny of all the things man has done in the
past and a new estimating of the motive
[12]

THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY

forces behind these actions. In the red
light of war, the last era of human activity,
the " Modern Era " shows itself in many
ways as a " sport," a development along
lines not implied by the pre-Renaissance
world but striking off at an unexpected and
not wholly advantageous angle. It is now
confronted by the blunt " No Thorough-
fare " of an annihilating war, and of neces-
sity there must be a certain measure of re-
turn toward the point where the wrong path
was chosen. In the abnormal development
of the peculiar elements of modern civiliza-
tion several essential matters, essential to
sane and righteous life, have been lost sight
of, and their determination and recovery
form the first task of the world that follows
the War. Immediately, therefore, we must
expect, and ensure, a new scrutinizing of
history, largely for the purpose of discern-
ing just what the vital impulses were that
lay behind those epochs of civilization more
successful than our own, in order that these
may be made operative again toward that
great regeneration that must follow war, if
we are not to sink back into a period of
Dark Ages differing only from those that
followed the fall of Rome in the greater
[13]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

blackness of their shame and the increased
N profundity of their oblivion.

This is my excuse for taking up with you
the question of the historical development
of one of the arts, and at a time when all
of us have little heart for the amenities of
life. But art is not an amenity of life: that
is just the point. Modern civilization has
made it that, and in this also modern civi-
lization is wrong. It is an integral part of
life itself, as indispensable as religion or
ethics or philosophy. It is the heritage of
all, not the appanage of the few, though it
has become the latter through the operation
of the false principles inherent in our
scheme of existence. For more than four
centuries the process of degeneration has
been working itself out, though it was only
during the nineteenth century that each of
the arts finally succumbed, architecture
going first, music and poetry coming last.
But for the War the case would have ap-
peared hopeless and we could have con-
fronted nothing but a life from which art
in all its forms was definitely excluded.
Now the War gives us not only a new hope,
but a new impulse ; a hope that art in all its
myriad forms may come again, an impulse
[14]

THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY

to go back and learn more, and along dif-
ferent lines, of the art of the past and of
what made it what it was, in order that we
may contribute something along these lines
to the new civilization that must arduously
be built up on the ruins of a great failure.

Art, in its many forms, is the most reli-
able history of a time, largely because it
does not deal with concrete facts which,
so far as absolute and final truth is con-
cerned, are of the nature of statistics, pro-
verbially said to be of the third and highest
degree of lies. The modern historical
method deals with facts, which are further
emphasized in their error by the applica-
tion of a mechanistic psychology, and the
result is about as illuminating as is the
method of the " higher criticism " when
applied to the Scriptures, or that of Morelli
in the case of attributions in painting. If
you would know what sort of men and
women they were who lived at any time, -
how they thought and felt, and why, — and
if you would approach some sound critical
estimate of the life they made, the world of
thought and feeling in which they lived,
go back to their art; to their architecture,
painting, and sculpture, their poetry, drama,
[15]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

and music, their industrial arts, their litur-
gies, and their ceremonial. To create a
fabulous epoch out of chronicles, dates, con-
crete acts, and documents, all fused in the
alembic of a personal and arbitrary psychol-
ogy, and then to test the art of that epoch
by this curious philtre, is folly: far more
sensible is it to interpret and co-ordinate
these same events in the light of the art that
is in itself the clear and naive revelation of
the soul of any time.

Behind our own era, which as I have
said begins with the first stirrings of the
Renaissance, lies the epoch of the Middle
Ages. For four hundred years it was mis-
judged and misrepresented by historians
and forgotten by the world at large. Three
quarters of a century ago it was rediscov-
ered, and the romanticism of the early nine-
teenth century in France and England, the
Catholic revival in religion, the Gothic
restoration in architecture were its first vis-
ible manifestations. Naturally they were
all more or less tinged by superficiality, by
a pale copying of externals, and naturally
also they synchronized with the triumphant
achievements of that modern civilization
against which they were a protest. For
[16]

THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY

both reasons the first movement broke down,
and the elapsed years of the twentieth cen-
tury saw its submergence under an univer-
sally victorious modernism. Now this vic-
tory shows itself as no other than ignomini-
ous defeat, and war sweeps the field clear
for new things. Can we, therefore, attempt
a new method, and as the echoes of annihila-
tion die away over the wide ruin of a dead
era, try once more to get nearer the secret
of this great epoch of Christian civilization
and recover something of its potency for
ourselves?

Much of what we need now, and shall
need increasingly when rebuilding takes the
place of destruction, lies there, — more than
we suspect, or, for the moment, should wel-
come. Confining ourselves, therefore, to
the single art of architecture, let us see if
we can discover what this paramount art of
the Middle Ages really was, what it grew
from, and by the operation of what forces,
— what it has for us today, not only in the
re-creation and rehabilitation of our own
dead art of architecture, but what it can
show us of the methods and accomplish-
ment of a great and very sane era of cul-
ture and civilization.

[17]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

When, fat with her wealth, her power,
and her pride of life, Rome fell before the
barbarian invaders, the destinies of Europe
were changed forever. The Mediterra-
nean races gave place to those from the
Baltic, the south yielded to the north,
civil power to ecclesiastical, secular Chris-
tianity to monastic, patristic theology to the
personal religion of the people; pagan and
Alexandrian philosophy was for the time
extinguished, and nationalism was merged
in tribalism. An " act of oblivion " was
passed by the dominant and savage north;
for three centuries progressive forgetful-
ness held dominion while a new race of
men hammered out the rough foundations
of a new world and the shaking successors of
St. Peter sat in a desolated Rome, the only
centre of approximate order in a whirlpool
of anarchy.

It is as hard to comprehend the complete
extinguishing of classical civilization in the
fifth century, as it would be for us today
to imagine the total obliteration of all the
achievements of the last four centuries, yet
the real and the supposititious cases are the
same, and what has once happened may
happen again. In hardly more than an
[18]

THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY

hundred years a State coterminous with the
world, proud, wealthy, invincible in the
field, boasting a superficial culture, insolent
in its assurance, magnificent in all its out-
ward forms of art and pageantry, broke
down, crumbled and utterly disappeared.
Rome declared her ability to extend her
own culture, with her civil and military
dominion, to all the barbarous peoples of
three continents, and in the end found that,
instead, she had sunk to the level of those
she would succour, who, themselves the vic-
tors, entered in and took possession. From
all sides, east, west, north, south, savage
hordes crept over the marble villas and
pleasant gardens and fertile farms of Brit-
ain, Gaul, the Rhineland, Africa, Syria,
leaving only ruin and desolation. Crept on
the great summer resorts with their terraced
palaces and their luxurious and profligate
life, the resorts that made the mountain
valleys and delicate rivers and Mediter-
ranean headlands and beaches pleasure
haunts of infinite delight. One by one they
vanished in flame and sack, until the forests
returned, the sand washed higher, obliterat-
ing even the calcined fragments of an archi-
tecture such as the world had never seen
[19]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

before. Alaric, Genseric, Attila, Ricimer,
one hardy and scornful leader after another,
laid siege to Rome, captured and sacked it,
and returned with booty that weighed down
the thousands of horses and the tens of
thousands of warriors. At last the wolves
prowled unmolested amongst the temples
and basilicas, the baths and fora and pal-
aces, of what had once been Imperial Rome,
while pestilence and famine decimated all
Italy, and deep woods and poisonous
marshes took the place of crowded cities
and broad acres of farms and gardens.

Even, memory of what had been was lost,
at least for the west. On the Bosporus a
New Rome preserved a lingering tradition
that died away before a subtle and encroach-
ing Orientalism and a degenerate but de-
lectable Hellenism. In the Benedictine
monasteries, now fast rising as fortresses of
refuge in the midst of catastrophe, manu-
scripts from devastated libraries were gath-
ered together and preserved, but the spirit
that alone possessed any element of vitality
was now anti-pagan and ascetic, and the
monks only guarded what they would not
use. And as the last memory of a classical
past had disappeared, so for several cen-
[20]

THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY

turies the new power — northern, Chris-
tian and monastic — showed no signs of
creating anything to take its place. Cul-
ture, even of the most rudimentary kind,
was non-existent: there was no art of any
sort, neither architecture, painting, sculp-
ture, poetry, music, drama, nor even the
minor arts of the craftsman. Education
was practically unknown, save the bare
rudiments that the priest must have, and
of learning there was no vestige in all
Europe.

It was a good clean blood, however,
that had entered the veins of Europe in
place of the poisoned and vitiated blood of
the south, and health conquered disease.
Clovis, who had defeated the degenerate
Romans at the Battle of Soissons in 486 and
accepted Christianity ten years later, had
established a new State in Gaul, Catholic,
in opposition to the Arian heresies of the
other converted northern tribes. St. Bene-
dict in the year 529 had founded his Order
that was to act as the spiritual stimulus of
Europe for a thousand years. In 587 Spain
had been won over from Arianism to Ca-
tholicism, in 590 St. Gregory became Pope
and wrenched the Church from the mire of
[21]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

the great degeneration, and in 597 sent St.
Augustine to begin the work of regenera-
tion in England. It was a good beginning,
but the power of dissolution was greater
than that of recovery; outside the monas-
teries culture and decency disappeared,
Mohammedanism rushed in like a flood
against the narrowing frontiers of Chris-
tianity, Spain was lost and the future seemed
to hold nothing but ruin and an ending of
all things.

With the year 732 the real recovery be-
gan, for it was then, at the Battle of Tours,
that Charles Martel — the Hammer that
not only smote back the Mohammedan in-
vasion but forged the mighty fabric of the
House of the Carolings — halted the Moors
in their invasion of Europe that already
had swept nearly to the gates of Paris.
Thirty-five years later Charlemagne began
the rebuilding of European civilization,
crushing the degenerate Lombards in Italy,
and the savage Saxons and Bavarians; de-
stroying the Avars in Austria, winning back
northern Spain, and giving a measure of
unity to a distracted and dislocated Europe.

It is the fashion to attribute to Ch'arle-
magne himself the credit for the sudden if
[22]

THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY

short recovery of art and learning and cul-
ture of the last half of the eighth century,
but as a matter of fact they and he were
linked results of the same slow process of
regeneration that began with St. Benedict
in his cave at Subiaco. He was of course
the visible agency of the culminating
achievement, for God always works through
individual men and women in the develop-
ment of His Will as this is exhibited on
earth, and it is only just that for all time
the first fruits of Christian society, organ-
ized and operative, should bear his name.

We must realize, however, that already a
great process of development had begun,
the end of which was to be a definitely
Christian system of life, when every phase
of thought and action should be interpene-
trated by a specifically Catholic force. The
entire space of time from Theodoric to
Otho the Great, exactly five centuries, is
given over to the struggles of a new spirit
to achieve the mastery, with its partial suc-
cess under Charlemagne, which was imme-
diately followed by complete failure, as
this in its turn was succeeded by a more
vigorous effort that was quickly crowned
by success.

[23]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

There is something almost mysterious in
the way in which the idea of secular world-
Empire grew under the Caesars, simultane-
ously with the idea of a world-Church.
This is the great contest of the first five
centuries of the Christian era, determined
at last against the imperial State, but not as
yet in favour of the imperial Church. As
Gregorovius says, the Empire stood for slav-
ery and despotism, with complete poverty
in creative ideas in civilization. All that
tended to raise the intellectual spirit to the
higher regions of thought was either non-
existent, or acclimatized from other lands.
On the other hand, the idea of the spiritual
world-State was developing simultaneously,
and Rome, the Eternal City, no sooner lost
all claim to the title, as a material force,
than she was taken over by the new spiritual
force, regenerated, made again of universal
dominion, and her claim to the epithet
" Eternal " vindicated anew. When the
Empire fell the Church was already an uni-
versal organization under the supreme di-
rection of the Bishop of Rome who was
acknowledged to be the Vicar of God on
Earth, and the imperium passed to her, of
right, though the process of transfer took
[24]

THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY

some time to accomplish — the epoch
known in history as the Dark Ages.

After their first successful invasions, the
Goths maintained a remote civil dominion
for Rome, or rather for the old Imperial
Roman idea, but after their defeat by the
emissaries of Byzantium, the last vestiges
of secular supremacy died away and its
impotent traditions maintained only a pale
continuance at Ravenna. It is during this
time that the Church made herself the
dominant influence in Europe, first by the
conversion of the Lombards and the other
heretical tribes, second by her successful
warfare against the Idea of the East as this
was embodied in the exarchs. Through
the first she exterminated the Arian and
other heresies, united Christianity and made
it Catholic over all Europe. Through the
second she beat back the peril of gov-
ernmental absolutism and made possible
the Christian social system, which was
feudalism.

During the great warfare that achieved
such vast victories there was little possibil-
ity of a creative culture that would have
expression in the form of art of any kind;
the issues were too colossal, the crises too
[25]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

acute. Not until the time of Charlemagne
could society begin to reap the benefits of
its great enfranchisement, but then the
ground had been won and held, though in-
securely, and the artistic results inevitably
followed.

What these results were, in architectural
form, I shall try to show in my next lecture ;
in the meantime I wish to place before you
the material from which these results were
obtained.

Neither architecture, nor any other art,
is the product of individual genius. There
is no such thing, properly speaking, as a
" new " style, and there never can be a
" new " art cut off from the succession of
the past. Perhaps this is why the sup-
posititious art of today — art nouveau, cub-
ist, impressionist, imagist, what you will
— is not art at all, but an unpleasant fiction
of auto-suggestion. The art of the Caro-
lingian era was genuine art, as far as it
went, and it was based on certain remains
of the antecedent epoch and worked out
largely by means of enduring principles
and traditions inherited from the same time.
The strictly pagan remains of Rome, south-
ern France, Treves were completely ig-
[26]

THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY

nored, though in the eighth century they
were ten times as numerous as now. In-
stead recourse was had to pagan architec-
ture as it had been adapted by Christianity,
and of this there was also far more than has
been preserved to our own time.

This " Early Christian Architecture "
had its habitat in four widely severed places,
but all of them available to Europe through
merchants, travellers, and pilgrims going to
or sent from these then flourishing centres.
Rome, Ravenna, Constantinople, and Syria
were, in varying degrees, centres of wealth
and activity in the Dark Ages, and even then
intercourse amongst them was constant, and
of a magnitude we can hardly appreciate.
In Rome were the great Constantinian
basilicas, — St. Peter's, St. John Lateran,
Sta. Maria Maggiore, San Clemente, Sta.
Agnese, and scores of others of lesser mag-
nitude, all couched in much the same style,
all magnificent, and touched with the mys-
terious splendour of the recognized centre
of spiritual authority and of civil dominion.
Always simple in plan, though varying con-
siderably in design (some being of the most
archaic basilican type, others with lofty
galleries over the aisles, long ranges of
[27]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

clerestory windows, and added accessories
of chapels and baptisteries), they all were
rich with antique columns of precious
marbles, sheathing of porphyry and ala-
baster, golden and azure mosaics, and altars
and ambos and thrones of the most sumptu-
ous design and the most rare materials. To
them men turned naturally first of all, and
then to Constantinople, where Justinian had
but recently immortalized himself as the
most princely builder of all time, through
his sequence of great domed temples, as
incredible in their magnificence as they
were masterly in their original scheme of
construction. Hagia Sophia was of course
the everlasting wonder of all Christendom,
but there were countless other smaller
churches, such as St. Irene and Holy Apos-
tles, and in Salonika, Trebizond, Bethle-
hem, Jerusalem, as well. Numbers of these
have wholly disappeared under Turkish
conquest, and we can only guess at their
nature, but there were many in the eighth
century, well known to the people of the
time, of which we know only by contem-
porary records.

In Syria, which is now for us only a bar-
ren desert, there were the great cities of a
[28]

THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY

once sumptuous civilization, and it is here,
half hidden under sand and debris, that
much has recently been found by Professor
Butler of Princeton that gives another aspect
to Christian archaeology. Here were three
great schools of architecture, counting from
north to south, which seem to contain more
of the elements of Mediaeval art than are
to be found elsewhere. It is from Syria,
apparently, that Diocletian drew the build-
ers of his amazing palace at Spalato, and
that Justinian found those who were to de-
velop for him the magnificent building of
his reign. In the south were the curious
structures, wholly of stone, that de Vogue
has so carefully studied, with their piers
instead of columns, their close-set transverse
nave and aisle arches carrying roofs of stone
slabs, and their arch abutments precisely
like those we find centuries later at Sant'
Ambrogio, Milan. Here also we find, as
at Zor-ah, the primitive domical churches,
polygonal in plan, set within a square, and
with absidioles in the angles, that are the
prototypes of San Vitale and Aix-la-Cha-
pelle. In the middle school, the closely
built piers of the south give place to very
wide spacing, with broad round arches and
[29]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

low clerestories of narrow windows. The
aisles are vaulted in stone, the roofs are of
wood. Here also we discover the norm of
the great flanking towers of the west ends
of Norman and Gothic abbeys and cathe-
drals, though at first they are low and rise
but little above the roof levels. The com-
plete parallel that exists between the
exterior architectural treatment of these
churches and that of the twelfth century
Romanesque work of southern France, is
startling. Columns are used on the apses
and chapels precisely as they are employed
there, and with the arched corbel table form
the prototype of the pilaster strips and
cornices of Lombardy and the Rhine. In
the north columns, once more, are gener-
ally used as supports; there are three apses,
instead of one, and these, curiously enough,
are often square in plan, even the main
sanctuary, like the early British church that
fixed the permanent type of square-ended
plan in England. Another singular innova-
tion is the lifting of the side chapels into
towers of several stories framing in the,
apse; a device which appears later at
Como and goes thence to the Rhineland,
where it becomes a characteristic and en-
[30]

THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY

tirely local feature. In this northern school
the feeling is predominantly Greek, in form
as well as in decoration. The carved orna-
ment is crisp and clean, and merges rapidly
into the intricate and brilliant patterning
of Byzantine art.

Finally, we have Ravenna with its work
of Theodoric and the Byzantine exarchs;
the tomb of Galla Placidia, San Vitale,
the two churches of Sant' Apollinare, the
baptistery, and probably other monuments
now destroyed. Both plan types are here,
basilican and domical, together with the
little tomb church, which is cruciform,
with a rudimentary central tower. Less
magisterial than the Roman basilicas, less
magnificent than the gold and marble won-
ders of Byzantium, the work is more akin
to the temper of the north and west, and
more adaptable because of its scale. Such
a plan as that of San Vitale would stimulate
any builder to creative action, as it did;
and the old school of craftsmen seemed to
last longer here than anywhere else, except
perhaps amongst the Comacini. At Pom-
posa and Bagnacavallo, near by, and at
Grado and Parenzo in Istria, are other ex-
amples of Ravennesque work; and alto-
[31]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

gether the city of the exarchs and of the
great northern barbarian, Theodoric, who
proved himself so sane and beneficent a
ruler, offered in the eighth century a series
of models that could only serve as a strong
incentive the moment a real, if transient,
vitality appeared in society itself.

[32]

LECTURE II
THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE

WITH the destruction of the magnificent
governmental system of Rome, all sem-
blance of civil order and authority was lost.
Sense of nationality was non-existent as yet,
racial lines had not asserted themselves, and
by a perfectly natural process the feudal
system grew up around the strong men, and
with the cordial approval of the Church.
In principle, and even more in its work-
ing out, it proved a most admirable and
efficient scheme of political and social
organization. From an economic stand-
point it was more successful and far more
just and beneficent than the industrial slav-
ery that preceded it, or the capitalistic
regime that has taken its place. This was
particularly true after it had fully devel-
oped the guild system which, during the
golden era of the central Middle Ages,
guaranteed freedom, justice, and honour-
able status for industry of every kind,
[33]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

Politically the results were equally good.
Every man owed service and a certain
amount of tribute in kind to the over-lord
next above him, who in his turn owed sim-
ilar service and truage, with the others of
his class, to the baron or count or bishop or
abbot in the next rank of the hierarchy, and
so on up to the sovereign authority over the
tribe or race or other governmental unit.
On his own part the over-lord was in theory
bound to defend the life and land of his
vassals and to see that justice was done
amongst them. The result was that from
the unit of the family up through the com-
mune, the county, the kingdom, and — from
Charlemagne on, as a general thing — the
Empire, every man was an integral part of
a small, manageable and personal group, not
as now, a negligible point in a vast and ab-
stract proposition where all personal rela-
tionship, personal duty, personal obligation
are impossible.

Out of this orderly organization grew the
sense of honour, and of faithful personal
service on the one hand, of generosity and
protection on the other, and we can under-
stand nothing of Medievalism unless we
give just regard to this almost fundamental
[34]

THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE

element in its constitution. Of course I am
stating here only an ideal, for there were
innumerable cases of failure, on the one
side or the other, to live up to this ideal;
cases of rebellion and treachery; of oppres-
sion, cruelty, and dishonour, but there is
good evidence to show that the ideal was
then as nearly approached in the majority
of instances, as, we will say, the ideals of
democracy have been approached in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I am sensible of the fact that some of you
may be very much shocked at hearing me
praise feudalism, and call it, as I most cer-
tainly do, the nearest recorded approach to
the Christian commonwealth. If you in-
deed are stirred by this sentiment then that
is what I mean when I refer to the misin-
terpretation of history that was one of the
salient characteristics of the nineteenth cen-
tury. The number of things that are called
" Mediaeval," particularly by political ora-
tors, educational experts, and other imper-
fectly educated people, is astounding. It is
a general term of modern, — as " Gothic "
was a general term of Renaissance, — con-
tempt, and it is employed with indifferent
discretion. Absolutism in government, re-
[35]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

ligious persecution, the Inquisition, untidi-
ness, conservatism, are all cheerfully de-
nominated " Mediaeval," in calm disregard
of the fact that they are all inventions or
practices of the Renaissance, or even, some
of them, of more modern times. In the
same way, feudalism, which certainly was
Mediaeval, is used as a synonym for all that
is dark, barbarous and oppressive.

A word of warning should be given those
who, very properly, turn to available con-
temporary documents, particularly those of
a legal nature, to obtain a first-hand idea of
feudalism as an actuality. The legal theo-
ries of feudalism were very lightly regarded
in actual practice, for there it was never a
question of what the law was, or might be
made, but what had been established by
ancient custom and universal acceptance.
The insanity of law-making and law-tinker-
ing which has been and is the curse of mod-
ern society is hardly three centuries old and
was then unknown. Government is not now
a system of laws but of decrees, differing
little in motive from the irresponsible edicts
of absolutism, and the result is general con-
tempt and a flagrant willingness to evade
the provisions of these decrees by every
[36]

THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE

possible means. Then the full force of uni-
versal custom was supreme; laws were this
custom proved and codified, and as a result
Law had a force that made it almost impre-
scriptible, while it represented not fluctuant
opinion but the matured results of the in-
terplay of influences both high and low.

A case in point is the shocking " droit de
seigneur," so often referred to by super-
ficial students of Medievalism. There is
actually no evidence to prove that this was
a recognized custom or even anything but
the most sporadic offence, no more repre-
sentative of feudalism than the alleged
" blue laws " are representative of democ-
racy. In the Middle Ages all relationship
was personal and direct, and of course much
depended on the personality of the over-
lord, but higher than he was Custom, the
unwritten and immemorial law of society;
and this custom was far less easily flouted
or evaded than are modern laws that are
too well known in the methods of their in-
ception and their enforcement to command
respect or ensure their obedient acceptance
by those who would evade their provisions.

I dare say the later feudalism, as it ap-
peared in the last days of the Middle Ages
[37]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

in Germany, and in other parts of Europe
in the earlier Renaissance, was dark, bar-
barous, and oppressive, but I am speaking
of it as it was in the eleventh, twelfth, and
thirteenth centuries, while it was the basis
of Christian society, and then it certainly
was quite the reverse. It came nearer a real
democracy than any other of the manifold
and optimistic experiments of man, for it
more nearly abolished privilege, estab-
lished equal opportunity and utilized abil-
ity, while it fixed the means of production
in the hands of the people, guaranteed a
fairly even distribution of wealth, organ-
ized workmen and craftsmen and artists
on a just and equable basis of labour and
compensation, and therefore helped in the
greatest production of vigorous, righteous,
and noble character that is of record in
human annals.

As economic feudalism had its flowering
in the guild system, so social feudalism grew
through the Crusades into the institution of
chivalry which, until it degenerated into the
licentious pageantry of the Renaissance, was
a vital force in society no substitute for
which has as yet been found. Of this, how-
ever, there was nothing at the moment when
[38]

THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE

Charlemagne took on himself the co-ordina-
tion of the wandering efforts that had pre-
ceded him, and the application of them
toward the organization of a new State and
the development of a new culture. Feudal-
ism was then in its most primitive estate,
nothing more than the offensive-defensive
alliance of groups of harried and poverty-
stricken men for the sheer preservation of
life and such poor property as they had.

The monastic system, as it had been or-
ganized by St. Benedict, he possessed in an
highly developed form, and he used it for its
full value. Indeed, without it he could have
done nothing, he could hardly have existed,
and it is not too much to say that but for the
monks from the sixth to the fourteenth cen-
tury, there would have been no Mediaeval-
ism, nor even any civilization at all, and
we still might be painting ourselves a dead
blue, with woad, as did our ancestors in
early Britain.

The Church of the first five centuries had
been essentially episcopal, that is, the devel-
opment and fixing of doctrine, discipline,
and ceremonial, the suppression of innu-
merable heresies, the direction of the con-
science both of individuals and of the
[39]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

Church itself, had been the work of the
episcopal order — bishops, metropolitans,
patriarchs, with, for at least three of those
centuries, the Pope sitting above all and
acting as the co-ordinating force. The
Church of the two succeeding epochs of five
centuries each, was essentially monastic,
with the Pope, secure and alone in his
supremacy, undisputed spiritual lord of all
Christendom, save only the patriarchate of
the east which was steadily declining in
culture, in moral force, and in civil author-
ity. From the year 529 the monasteries
of St. Benedict formed an ever-increasing
number of refuges from a world crumbling
about men's ears, the only centres of order,
of culture (such as it was), of ethical in-
tegrity. They rapidly took over many of
the functions of the destroyed civil govern-
ment— education, mercy, the direction of
agriculture and industry, the fostering of
art and letters — and in that long interval
between the. destruction of the Roman im-
perium and the rebirth of sense of national-
ity served as the centres around which dis-
tracted men gathered into communities for
self-preservation. If we are tempted at
times to disapprove the apparent seculariza-
[40]

THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE

tion of abbots, monks, and monasteries, in
the Dark Ages and during Medievalism,
we must remember that tasks and duties
rightly belonging to the civil order had been
taken over by them simply because there
was nothing else that would or could ad-
minister them, and that therefore they were
forced to play a dual role if society was to
be preserved from total destruction.

The same is true also of the Papacy and
the whole Catholic Church. The division
of the Empire, the transference of the seat
of authority to Constantinople, the aban-
donment of Europe, and the incursions of
the barbarians had left the Pope as the only
visible sign of authority, not only in Italy
but in all western Europe. Willingly or
unwillingly he found himself compelled to
exercise on his own part the double function
of spiritual head of Christendom and the
centre of secular authority. Whether the
succeeding pontiffs acquitted themselves
well of their enormous task, or ill, is not
the question : some did, some did not, but in
any case they played a part there was no one
else to play, and they were the chief agents
in bringing some semblance of order out
of chaos, largely through the Benedictine
[41]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

monks who were ready at hand in almost
every land, the more barbarous and insecure
the better, so far as their own inclinations
were concerned.

Apart from the universal conviction
throughout Christian Europe, of the unity
of the Church, an unity made visible
through the identity of doctrine, discipline,
and worship between Rome itself and the
smallest missions on the far fringes of
Christendom, the destruction of sense of na-
tionality and the multitude of feudal groups
made Rome still more the one possible
centre of union. This enforced secular
supremacy may possibly have been unfor-
tunate for the Church in her spiritual as-
pect, but the fact remains that for a thou-
sand years she was the one fixed and in-
variable fact in Europe, the one authority
that remained unaffected by the rise and
fall of kings, of dynasties, of the Empire
itself. Heresy could not shake her, schism
could not diminish her power. Bad bish-
ops, recreant priests and monks, evil in-
truders even on the chair of Peter, anti-
popes in armed contention, all left her in
the end just as she had been before, and
however hopeless her case from time to
[42]

THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE

time, reform succeeded in the end, and great
figures like Gregory the Great, Gregory
VII, Innocent III appeared to raise her still
higher than before in power and in visible
glory. Whether we like it or not, the Catho-
lic Church remains the greatest single fact
in human history. It is therefore hardly
to be wondered at that for this same thou-
sand years the Catholic Church should have
seemed to all Christians, and should actu-
ally have been, a greater force in secular,
as well as in spiritual affairs, than kings and
emperors.

Now it was during this very period that
culture, civilization, and the arts were born
again, and chiefly that art of architecture
we are considering, since it is the most
brilliant instance of logical and consistent
growth that is of record in the annals of
man, reaching as it did, in the end, a su-
preme height that staggers the imagination.
It fell with the power that had created it,
for the last five centuries have been of a
temper as different from the " Great Thou-
sand Years " as these were different from
paganism itself. From then on diversity in
religion took the place of unity, the long
contest between Church and State was de-
[43]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

termined in favour of the secular power,
and religion has become less and less a
matter of moment. The Catholic Church
has now taken its place in general esti-
mation as only the largest amongst some
one hundred and forty divisions of Chris-
tianity, without material effect in some na-
tions, dominant in the Mediaeval sense in
none. Nationality has split Europe into
self-conscious and mutually inimical frag-
ments as the Reformation split Christianity;
and of necessity therefore, the art, and very
particularly, the architecture, of the post-
Reformation era has been in a category by
itself.

In dealing then with the development of
architecture from Charlemagne to Henry
VIII we must first visualize for ourselves
the Europe of that era, though admittedly
the task is no easy one. It was in every
great and every little respect utterly dif-
ferent to what it is today, while it is cut off
from us by five centuries of an entirely new
civilization of which we are children by
inheritance and therefore almost incapable
of thinking back into a time with which we
have little sympathy either by temper or by
tendency. Summarized, the points to be
[44]

THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE

borne in mind are these. Total extinction
of classical civilization, with at first the
wiping out even of the memory thereof. A
new race taking over the entire direction of
affairs, of the north, northern: savage, il-
literate, but clean in blood, inordinately
vigorous, fresh from the cold hard shores
of the Baltic. The extinction of civil gov-
ernment, order, law: the substitution of
tribal instincts for those of nationality, and
the rapid development of a feudal system
of personal relationships, as much in ad-
vance of what it superseded as it differed
therefrom. Wide extension of Christianity
of explicitly Catholic type, with the sup-
pression and extermination of Arianism and
all other heresies. Unity of theological be-
lief and religious practices, with the Papacy
as the only recognized centre of spiritual
authority and as the one indestructible in-
stitution in the world. A monastic system,
Benedictine by rule, that was rapidly ex-
tending itself, through its innumerable
monasteries and its equally innumerable
missionaries, not only in Christian Europe,
but into every neighbouring heathen land
as well, and coming in close touch with al-
most every man, woman, and child as reli-
[45]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

gious director, educator, civilizer, and uni-
fying power. Such was Europe, if we use
the term geographically; culturally, nation-
ally, Europe was non-existent. Manners,
morals, customs, all had fallen to the lowest
point recorded in history; and learning,
culture, and even decency had fled to the
east, taking refuge with the Mohammedan
Arabs in the Caliphate of Baghdad. Cor-
rupt as the Papacy had become in the gen-
eral corruption it was all there was of order
in the west, and, vastly strengthened by
a definite accession of temporal power
through the conferring on Pope Stephen by
King Pepin of the Exarchate of Ravenna
in 756, it could at least act as a general
unifying influence both spiritually and
temporally.

Against this single authority Charle-
magne first set a new civil power, not in
opposition but in union, and with a breadth
of vision, a practicality of action, that shine
singly in the long night of the Dark Ages.
With a strong hand he reformed the
Church, founded new monasteries, built up
schools, fostered agriculture, and sur-
rounded himself with all the scholars and
artists and craftsmen he could gather from
[46]

THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE

the four quarters of Europe: Alcuin of
Britain, Peter of Pisa, Paul the Doctor,
Theodaulphus of Spain, Eberhard, Hinc-
mar, Erugena, Radbertus Maurus.

Charlemagne was not a sudden figure of
light and power, shot headlong, cometwise,
through the night of the Dark Ages : he was
rather the crest and culmination of a long,
slow, upward sweep of recovery, the origin
of which was far away at the very begin-
nings of that sixth century that saw the end-
ing of one era, the opening of another.
When, at the hands of the Pope, he was
crowned Emperor of the West, on Christ-
mas Day, A.D. 800 in St. Peter's, the highest
point was reached in the five-century era
we call roughly the Dark Ages. After his
death, fourteen years later, the curve began
to decline until it sunk again as low as be-
fore, in order that once more, the five-hun-
dred-year vibration being accomplished, a
new rise might be initiated that for its own
period of an identical number of years,
should mark the achievement, yet in the end
the inevitable loss, of all Charlemagne had
striven to attain.

He was the first great builder for five
centuries; but of all the work in which he

[47]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

was personally interested — churches, mon-
asteries, palaces — nothing remains but the
royal chapel at Aix-la-Chapelle, and this
outwardly, and in a measure internally, has
been radically rebuilt. His secretary, Eber-
hard, built a small church at Steinbach
which, shorn of its aisles, still remains in a
ruinous and desecrated condition, and a few
years later St. Michael's, Fulda, was
erected. The interesting gateway and
chapel at Lorsch is fifty years later in date.
In France the baptistery of St. Jean, Poi-
tiers, and the unique church of Germigny-
des-Pres are about all we have. How much
has been destroyed that would be illuminat-
ing on the point of architectural develop-
ment, it is impossible to say, but there is
little in what remains that would indicate
irreparable loss. The chapel at Aix is
simply San Vitale at Ravenna coarsened
and largely built of old materials. It is
an octagon within an aisle of sixteen sides,
with a square presbytery, two staircase
towers, and a rectangular tribune : the vault-
ing of the aisles is without ribs, and the
windows are round arched and splayed.
Of course the dome, gables, towers, and
accessories are comparatively modern addi-
[48]

THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE

tions. Einhard is usually said to have been
the " architect," but Rivoira questions this,
making him a kind of clerk of the works,
the master-builder having come from By-
zantium, with, working under him, Italian
craftsmen and local Prankish labourers.
Steinbach is equally unimaginative and even
more primitive, a T-cross plan with aisles
and a semicircular apse, the simplest form
of Roman basilica, translated into the rough
materials of a northern and barbarous land.
Germigny-des-Pres is a curious cross-shaped
plan in a square enclosing nave, with a small
apse terminating each of the four arms.
The plan is remotely Byzantine, but the ex-
terior composition with its central tower,
its gables, and its lean-to aisles is essentially
northern in expression and in a distant sort
of way may be considered, if not the proto-
type, at least the first hesitating step in the
direction of the development that three cen-
turies later was to begin in power and end
in the unexampled nobility of the Gothic
church. The interesting and even original
decorative scheme of inlaid stonework at
Lorsch and at Poitiers with its abortive
pilasters and triangular windows and steep
decorative gables, is also of the north, but
[49]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

it never led anywhere and is no more than
the sport of ambitious incompetence.

Charlemagne neither invented nor re-
created a style : what he did was simply to
stimulate into activity the moribund tradi-
tions of building, and as well the inheritors
of these traditions. There were still in
Ravenna the descendants of earlier and
more competent craftsmen; the Lombards
had built up a building trade of sorts and
these men were undoubtedly eager for an
opportunity to show what they could do.
Finally, and most important of all, were
the Comacini. This mysterious guild is first
referred to by name in the Code of King
Rotharis, the Lombard, in the year 640, but
after a manner that proves a long prior
existence, and a century later King Liut-
prand in an official memorandum, recog-
nizes in detail the dignity and importance
of its members even above all other of his
Italian subjects. There is little doubt that
these Comacini were the lineal successors
of the old Roman building guilds, some
members of which had fled to Como after
the final ruin of the Empire and had pre-
served somewhat of their organization and
of their methods and traditions, handing
[50]

THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE

them down to successive generations though
with constantly weakening force. It is pos-
sible that they were the progenitors of the
order of Freemasons, but in any case they
represent the most vigorous survival of the
Roman building guilds and served to pre-
serve some part of the old tradition while
they contributed such architecture as was
possible during the Dark Ages, until a new
vitality in the world made inevitable a new
art that was based on the very principles
and methods they had saved from the gen-
eral wreck.

The Comacini were a true building guild
of masons, joiners, stone carvers; organized
in lodges, with their apprentices, work-
men, and masters. Traditionally the north
Italian lakes were their habitat, but they
journeyed from place to place to undertake
such small work as the times might de-
mand. For several centuries they learned
nothing and forgot much. From the great
days of the Baths of Diocletian — that most
amazing building that contains in embryo
so many of the structural elements of Me-
diaeval architecture — to such poor little
half barbarous efforts as Toscanella, is a
fall indeed, but it is something that even

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

this was possible considering that civiliza-
tion itself had ceased, and Toscanella, with
the similar work of the school of Ravenna,
in eastern Italy and Dalmatia, was not only
the last word in a long decline but the first
of a still more amazing advance that rose
at last to a point where even the Baths of
Diocletian were immeasurably surpassed.

What these building guilds did was to
standardize architecture along simple lines
that fitted the time ; but while it so lost all
vitality it gained in two directions: first, by
being held always to a standard that, while
low and tending always lower, was defi-
nitely higher than the apology for civiliza-
tion in which it was immersed; second,
through the purging away of that artificial
and illogical formalism that had been the
last estate of a great art of building. What
happens when a once noble art dissolves at
last and no body of men remains to preserve
traditions and hold to standards, we can see
here in America between the years 1835 and
1885. Nothing quite so bad as this occurred
in Europe during the Dark Ages, and for
this we must thank the Comacini and their
fellows. We can also see in the so-called
" classical " architecture of the nineteenth
[52]

THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE

century in Europe as well as America, what
equally happens when life has gone out of a
style, leaving it a mass of artificial dogmas
and prejudices, and when material prosper-
ity, instead of ruin and desolation, forms its
environment. If ease and peace and plenty
had followed the last decadence of Roman
art it is hard to see how art itself could ever
have happened again. As it was the non-
sense was completely knocked out .of it by
adversity: for three centuries it was archi-
tecture reduced to its lowest terms, which
is a very good thing for this or any other
art — or society itself, for that matter —
whenever a drastic reform is imperative.

In estimating the work of this period
from the fall of Rome to the beginning of
the " Great Recovery " in the eleventh cen-
tury, when nearly all the structural features
that underlie the great Gothic of the Middle
Ages were to take form and shape, it must
always be remembered that we are dealing
with only a casual few of the structures that
once existed. It is very tempting to
work assiduously backward year after year
through half forgotten fragments, finding
at last the one where first appears some
pregnant device later to achieve immortal-
[53]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

ity in a Durham or a Notre Dame, and to
hail this as the actual work of genius from
which so much was to follow. For one such
monument that remains an hundred have
been destroyed to tantalize us by their bare
foundations, like St. Martin of Tours, for
instance, that owes its destruction to the in-
sanity of the French Revolution. What
may have been here in these ruined sanc-
tuaries no one can say, but at least there is
evidence to prove not only that Gothic did
not spring full-fledged from the marvellous
half century between 1150 and 1200, but
that the various elements that make up its
organism were either the result of a slow
development extending over centuries, or of
the return to far-away types suggested at
least in the later architecture of Rome it-
self. For this reason the quarrel as to which
church possesses the earliest ribbed vault
is little to the point. It may be Monte-
fiascone, or Sant' Ambrogio, or Durham,
but may perfectly well have been any one
of another score of French or Lombard
churches, no vestige of which now remains ;
moreover the fact still confronts us that in
Syria, and even in the later buildings of the
Roman Empire, ribbed vaults were used,
[54]

THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE

and their reappearance in the eleventh cen-
tury may be the result either of reinven-
tion or of rediscovery of precedents long
forgotten.

The question therefore suggests itself:
May we not, in pronouncing the work of the
Dark Ages generally barren and retrogres-
sive, be doing it injustice, just because the
great mass of building has been utterly de-
stroyed? The chance is negligible, for the
chapel at Aix remains and San Lorenzo
Maggiore, Milan, in its plan and general
structure, and we know that both were
lauded by contemporary chroniclers as
crowning and incredible triumphs of art.
Undoubtedly they represent the best work
possible to the Comacine guilds of the
north, as Sant' Apollinare in Classe, Pa-
renzo, and Pomposa were the best the suc-
cessors of the guilds of Ravenna could pro-
duce in their own territory, and on this
basis we can only estimate the architecture
of the sixth and seventh centuries as dry,
lifeless, and without invention, yet possessed
of a certain naive seriousness and self-re-
spect that enlist our sympathy if they cannot
win our admiration.

Two general plans were in vogue and
[55]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

employed indifferently as between the
region architecturally subject to Ravenna
and that which fell to the lot of the Coma-
cine masters : the basilica and the aisled and
domed polygon. The basilica was the orig-
inal Roman hall, with its two rows of col-
umns supporting arches that bore the small-
windowed clerestory, and divided the area
into three sections, the central one being
about double the width of the side aisles.
In the simplest form the nave proper ends
in a semicircular apse surmounted by a half
dome, smaller apses for side altars being
added later as terminations of the aisles.
The central area was covered by a trussed
roof of timber, the side aisles by lean-to
roofs, and there were neither towers, domes,
nor masonry vaults. As the churches grew
in size an aisleless transept was added be-
tween nave and apse to give space for richer
ceremonial, greater numbers of clergy or
monks, and for additional altars. So came
the T-cross plan which is the basis of all
Mediaeval church plans. This basilican
type was practically universal under Con-
stantine, and in the end it won, during the
Dark Ages, supremacy in the west, quite
displacing the circular or polygonal type.
[56]

THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE

This latter had an eventful career. Its
prototype may be found in certain Roman
tombs and great apartments in the Imperial
baths, though the analogy is somewhat
strained, and the relation between the cali-
darium of the Baths of Caracalla and San
Vitale is far to seek. The first is simply a
circular hall enclosed by enormously thick
walls in which square and semicircular
niches are cut, and surmounted by a low,
ponderous dome : it is without any particu-
lar articulation and is quite static in quality.
The second is highly organized, with the
load concentrated on massive piers, between
which little arcaded apses project into an
intricately vaulted, surrounding aisle of two
superimposed stories. One of these apses
is thrust through the aisle until it projects
beyond the perimeter of the aisle wall. The
central polygon rises well above the aisles
and is covered by a hemispherical dome
which is supported by large arches sub-
divided by columns into three spaces also
covered by arches: altogether a very rich
and highly articulated scheme unlike any-
thing Rome can offer in comparison. It
seems to me an undoubted fact that the
polygonal and domical church is a develop-
[57]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

ment of the East, probably in the dioceses
of Damascus and Antioch, and brought
thence to Constantinople and Ravenna by
master builders who we know were contin-
ually drawn from this section by the Em-
perors of the East.

Whatever its source it was the chief fac-
tor in the development of the supreme archi-
tecture of the reign of Justinian, and
through San Vitale, Aix-la-Chapelle and
Sta. Maria Maggiore, Milan, had every-
thing to do with the evolution of the Gothic
chevet, as I shall try to show later. In it-
self, as the general scheme for a church, it
found scant favour in the West, yielding
place to the basilican form, which had es-
tablished itself in Rome, had already gone
thence with the spreading of Christianity,
and was by nature capable of almost in-
definite expansion in all directions.

Throughout the Dark Ages, then, this
basilican form, reduced to its lowest terms,
was the standard of building. The vast
majesty of the Constantinian churches in
Rome, the marble and mosaic splendours of
the Constantinople of Justinian, the more
sober richness of the Ravenna of the ex-
archs were very far away, and in their place
[58]

THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE

we have rough masonry of brick and stone,
small round-arched windows with splayed
reveals, misfit marble columns, with odds
and ends of capitals left from ruined build-
ings, and exteriors unornamented except
for narrow pilaster strips, arched corbel
courses, and sometimes, as at Agliate and
San Vincenzo in Prato, rude arcades built
up on the haunches of semi-domes to sup-
port the protecting roofs.

Of ornamental carving there is more than
one might expect, but it usually appears in
altar fronts and canopies, and in tombs. It
is very flat, very conventionalized, yet deco-
rative and with a curiously delicate feeling
for space composition. The symbolism is
conservatively Early Christian, the motives
decadent Byzantine with curious Syrian
admixtures, and here and there, as in the
increasing frequency of dragons and wild
beasts and birds, something that is essen-
tially of the north. It is only here, how-
ever, that the new barbarian blood begins
to show itself; structurally and in point of
architectural design the northern races, in
spite of their universal dominion, exert no
influence whatever. The slowly expiring
tradition of Rome, Ravenna, and Byzan-
[59]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

tium is still in full control, and it is not until
the beginning of the eleventh century (that
mystical year 1000, when the world awakes
to new possibilities and begins the develop-
ment of the greatest era in history) that the
tribes of the north, Christianized, brought
into orderly association, and subjected to
the vital stimulus of a regenerated monas-
ticism, begin to raise the fabric of their
own self-expression on the foundations fur-
nished for them by the humble builders of
the Dark Ages. It has been a long period
of five centuries of arduous growth, not
into civilization but toward it. They had
destroyed the classical culture of Rome as
they had devastated her cities, but instead
of inheriting her wealth and acquiring ease
and plenty they had found themselves heirs
to poverty, anarchy, and desolation. One
thing they had gained which had been no
part of their plan, and that was Christian-
ity; and the Church, standing for five hun-
dred years before their eyes as the one
centre of certainty in a wilderness of change
and hopeless disorder, had, through her
monks and missionaries, subjected them to
new influences that in the end must bear
fruit in a new culture, a new civilization,
[60]

THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE

a new righteousness, and therefore a new
art. What the results were we shall try to
see when we take up in our next lecture
the story of amazing advance from the mil-
lennial year that saw the Dark Ages end
and the great Catholic Middle Ages begin
their triumphant career.

[61]

LECTURE III
THE GREAT AWAKENING

THE Carolingian renaissance was short-
lived : there was always something artificial
and predetermined about it, and it outlived
the great Emperor scarcely a generation.
Fourteen years after the crowning in St.
Peter's, he was dead and succeeded by his
son, Louis the Pious, who was ill-fitted for
those strenuous times. Royal quarrels
wrecked the unstable Empire, and at the
Treaty of Verdun it fell apart, rent verti-
cally between France, Lorraine and Italy,
and Germany, the second division then in-
cluding all of what is now France east of
the Rhone and Germany west of the Rhine,
while Germany itself extended only as far as
the Elbe in the north, the Danube and Save
in the south. Brandenburg, Pomerania, and
Prussia were still entirely barbarian, and
destined to remain so for four centuries.

The decline in culture and civilization
was instant and headlong: war and anarchy
[62]

THE GREAT AWAKENING

took the place of order, morals degenerated,
and once more savage invaders — North-
men in France, Huns in Germany -
pushed on across the dissolving frontiers
carrying fire and death and leaving wide
ruin behind them. It was bad enough in
France where the Vikings from their long
ships were sweeping all the north and sail-
ing up the Seine to sack and burn Rouen
and Paris, and in Germany where the Huns
were following suit, but it was worst of all
in Italy, for there the collapse of society
was most complete. The degradation of
morals was so flagrant that at last the gen-
eral corruption infected even the Church,
which, already rent by the Eastern schism
in 866, sank to the lowest point in its his-
tory., There were of course good bishops,
priests, and especially monks, who had not
abandoned themselves to simony, pluralism,
and debauchery, but the rule was other-
wise, and for years even the chair of Peter
was filled by laymen and simoniacal priests
who had won their places through bribery,
corruption, and murder, and even, for one
incredible period, by the bastards and
favourites of the unspeakable Marozia and
her Roman clan.

[63]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

If the Carolingian epoch was the " false
dawn" of Christian civilization, the last half
of the ninth century and the first quarter
of the tenth formed that darkest period of
night that comes just before the real dawn.
For the dawn came, in the midst of a tem-
pest of destruction, horror, and humilia-
tion; came as irresistibly as the rising of
the sun, and, it would seem, as independ-
ently of human control. Just why this sud-
den and unpredicted regeneration should
then have shown itself with power is hard
to say. It is sufficiently easy to understand
why the eleventh century should have begun
in vigour to close in glory, for by that time
all things had been prepared, but why out
of the horror of the ninth century should
suddenly arise the first beginnings in the
tenth is one of those phenomena that baffle
the understanding of evolutionists and are
comprehensible only to those who believe
that the destinies of the world are under
the guidance and control of a Supreme Om-
niscience Who walks not by the ways of
man but otherwise.

In any case the change occurred and with
startling suddenness and energy. The first
significant event, marking the sharp transi-
[64]

THE GREAT AWAKENING

tion from one century to another, is the
founding of the monastery of Cluny in 909.
Since the establishing of the Order of St.
Benedict nothing so pregnant of possibili-
ties for the future had taken place. Cluny
was Benedictinism, reformed, regenerated,
and showing itself in different guise, but the
legitimate successor of the earlier monasti-
cism, and in itself, and through its offshoot,
the Cistercian Order, was to act as the spir-
itual stimulus of Europe for two centuries
and make possible the great epoch of
Medievalism.

The Cluniac Rule was promulgated in
927, by Abbot Odo, and from that date
Cluny became an operative and dominant
force. In the meantime secular events of
equal importance had taken place, for in
919 Henry the Fowler began the Saxon
line that was to lead to Otto the Great, and
the resurrected Holy Roman Empire. In
England the work and character of Alfred
the Great were bearing fruit in a rapid in-
crease in culture, craftsmanship, learning,
and international influence, with St. Dun-
stan as a type of the time and a kind of
patron saint of all the arts from architec-
ture to embroidery. In a way, however,
[65]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

Alfred must be looked on as a later counter-
part of Charlemagne, embodying as he did
the low cresting of the wave of the Dark
Ages, from 500 to 1000, rather than the
first evidences of the new life that was to
mark the succeeding epoch. His own era of
advancement was short-lived; the Danish
invasions followed, with a consequent period
of retrogression, and the real era of Mediae-
valism was not to begin until the Norman
Conquest of 1066, a full century later than
the beginnings on the Continent.

In 936 Otto the Great became Emperor
and under his firm hand the Hungarians
and Slavs were beaten back, new regions
were brought under western influence,
Christianity crossed over the borders of
heathen neighbours, and the new power,
order, and dignity of the Teutonic empire
led inevitably to the union of Germany and
Italy and the founding of the Holy Roman
Empire of the Germanic peoples. Hugh
Capet in 987 wrote " finis " at the end of
the line of degenerate Carolingians and
established the Capetian dynasty, while
Denmark in 935 and Poland in 966 had
accepted Christianity and marked their
submission by enthroning Christian kings.
[66]

THE GREAT AWAKENING

Nor must the influence of the Arabs be dis-
regarded. From their capitol at Cordova,
a centre of education, learning, science, and
culture, a vital and stimulating force had
extended itself over all western Europe,
curiously combining with the new Catholic
and monastic spirit, to give a fresh impetus
to renascent civilization. Finally, in the
very last year of the tenth century, the degra-
dation of the Papacy received its first check
through Pope Sylvester II, who was fol-
lowed by Benedict VIII, and, after the
scandalous relapse of John XIX and Bene-
dict IX, by such great leaders and true
shepherds as Clement II, Leo IX, and
Hildebrand Pope Gregory VII, the last one
of the very great figures in history and the
corner-stone of the Mediaeval Church.

From the beginning the monks of Cluny
had been the chief influence toward right-
eousness, steadfast even when the Papacy
itself was renegade and rotten, and in the
end lifting it to their own lofty plane of
thought, conduct, and action. Partly Jbe-
cause of this faithfulness (which was pre-
served and even intensified by the succeed-
ing Cistercians, Carthusians, and Augus-
tinians, and even later by the Dominicans
[67] '

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

and Franciscans) , the " regulars " or monas-
tic clergy not only acquired power and in-
fluence, together with the confidence and
affection of the people, far above that of
the secular or parochial clergy, but they
dominated and controlled the episcopate
and even the Papacy itself. For a time
Cluny was more powerful than the Pope,
and so was Clairvaux in its turn, and as
the first took charge of the Normans, Chris-
tianizing them and making Normandy the
greatest centre of energy in Europe, so the
second seized upon the Franks and gave to
them the task, and the ability to accomplish
it, of perfecting what Normandy had
initiated.

Between them they created the Christian
civilization of the Middle Ages, monasti-
cism in two diverse forms working through
two races of diverse blood, but both essen-
tially of the north; Norman on the one
hand, French and Burgundian on the
other. The expression of this civilization
in artistic form was, first, Norman archi-
tecture, second, the Gothic architecture of
the He de France.

The experience of every student of
Medievalism is, I think, a first return to
[68]

THE GREAT AWAKENING

the thirteenth century as the centre of in-
terest and enthusiasm, then an immediate
working back to the twelfth century as
representing something far more massive,
vigorous, and significant, and finally an
almost enforced return to the eleventh cen-
tury. The thirteenth, well called by Dr.
Walsh " the greatest of centuries," was an
era of glorious accomplishment, but in it
were already showing the first evidences of
dissolution. The twelfth was the century
of magnificent endeavour, and all that was
great in its successor is here in embryo, not
alone in art but in philosophy, religion, and
the conduct of life. The eleventh century
is a time of aspiration and of vision, of the
enunciation of new principles and of the
first shock of contest between the old that
was doomed, the new that was destined to
unprecedented victories. Great leaders
suddenly arise out of an age without lead-
ers: Henry II, Henry IV, Edmund Iron-
sides, Edward the Confessor, William the
Conqueror, Boleslav of Poland, Olaf of
Sweden, Sancho the Great of Navarre,
Pope Sylvester II, Leo IX, Gregory VII,
St. Anselm, Lanfranc, St. Peter Damian,
Fulbert of Chartres, Bernward of Hildes-
[69]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

heim, Guido Arretino, Avicenna; monas-
teries and convents on the reformed lines
of Cluny were springing up on every hand,
redeeming the wilderness, spreading edu-
cation, establishing works of mercy and
charity.

The civilization of the eleventh century
was monastic, feudal, and predominantly
Norman. Its vitality was prodigious. At
every point the heathen assaults had been
beaten back, the peril of the false prophet
was apparently at- an end, and the northern
tribes, whether Teutonic, Norse, Saxon, or
Frank, had been Christianized and partly
assimilated, excepting always the still
heathen tribes of Prussia and Brandenburg.
Feudalism had saved Europe with the aid
of St. Benedict and his monks: now the
reformed Benedictines of Cluny were to
redeem it, with the Christianized Vikings
of Normandy as their efficient arm. Origi-
nally the most savage of peoples they had
perforce followed their Duke Richard when
he accepted Christianity in 961, and in two
generations had become the most zealous
and active adherents of the Church. In the
first half of the eleventh century, twenty
great monasteries, including three of world-
[70]

THE GREAT AWAKENING

wide influence (Bee, Fecamp, and Ju-
mieges), were founded in Normandy alone,
and into Britain, Italy, Sicily, the Levant,
streamed the Norman adventurers, light-
heartedly, high-handedly, seizing on degen-
erate counties and dukedoms, cutting out
new kingdoms for themselves and generally
becoming both a public nuisance and an
agency of regeneration.

It must all have been very unpleasant for
the upholders of the ancien regime, the
simoniacal Popes, absentee bishops, and
married or profligate clergy; for the degen-
erate feudal lords, the faineant kings, and
the Emperors both of the West and the East
who had, as they thought, safely brought
the great engine of the Church under their
direct and personal control. Never was
such an upheaval, such a rattling of the dry
bones of wide decrepitude by militant
monks hot with the zeal of reform, and
Norman, Prankish, and Flemish adven-
turers whose headstrong careers were em-
bellished by an equally headstrong religious
ardour. In the end Europe proved too
small for the exuberant vitality of a north
that suddenly had found itself, and the riot
of action culminated, just as the century
[71]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

closed, in the astonishing spectacle of the
First Crusade.

Of course art answered to the exciting
stimulus, as it always does when the driving
impulse is based on fundamental things.
Music, from about 1030, developed on new
and brilliant lines; at the very beginning of
the century nuns in their Rhenish cloisters
were writing Latin comedies; in Hildes-
heim and Liege the arts of metal achieved
a sudden and amazing splendour, sculpture
began its recovery in the south of France,
while architecture opened like an expand-
ing flower, not only in Normandy, but in
France, Burgundy, the Rhineland, and
every quarter of Italy from Lombardy to
Calabria and Sicily.

Three tendencies show themselves, or
rather we should say, three schools develop,
for the tendency of all was at first the same,
though one of the schools was short-lived
and played little part in the later develop-
ments of the other two which, merged at
last, furnished all of Gothic except the
vitalizing spirit. These three schools were
those of Tuscany, Lombardy, and Nor-
mandy. The first, which was sporadic and
of very brief duration, is mysterious and
[72]

THE GREAT AWAKENING

almost inexplicable, and is represented,
amongst existing buildings, by San Miniato
and the Baptistery in Florence, and, in a
measure, by Pisa Cathedral. This work is
generally included under the generic title
" Lombard," but this seems to me a mistake,
for it is structurally and aesthetically dif-
ferent from the true Lombard work of the
same period. Certain common elements
are visible, for example, qualities that are
conspicuously Syrian, but the things that,
in Lombard architecture, are traceable to
Ravenna, or to the Comacine guilds, do not
appear at all. Structurally this Tuscan
work is static, while its rival is constantly
progressing through one experiment after
another until it arrives at a point where
its new and pregnant devices are taken over
by the Franks and made into Gothic. In
craftsmanship it is vastly superior to the
nascent art of the Lombards, clean-cut, deli-
cate, classical, while its inlaid, polychro-
matic ornament is in a class by itself. You
cannot call it Ravennesque, still less can
you call it Byzantine; in a sense it is classi-
cal Greek, though strongly modified by an
Eastern influence and adapted to the new
environment of a Christian society. Bishop
[73]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

Hildebrand began San Miniato in 1013, but
there is no record of the name of the master
builder. He could have been no local genius,
for no building exists in Tuscany, or has
been recorded, that resembles it in the least.
It is not a direct successor of the Roman
basilica, for it shows an articulation of a
high order and is manifestly the result of
many generations of development. It bears
not the slightest relation to Toscanella, and
as for the Comacini, a glance at Sant'
Abondio, Como, exactly contemporary in
date, dispels all thought of authorship on
their part. It seems to be the work of some
Greek artist from Syria, for with its divi-
sion into three square bays of three arched
openings each, separated by piers carrying
transverse arches across nave and aisles
alike, it has a close resemblance to certain
ruined churches of the diocese of Antioch
of a period antedating the work of Justinian
at Constantinople. The Florentine Bap-
tistery is of the same temper, Syrian Greek
as opposed both to Byzantium and Ravenna;
but the Duomo of Pisa, while Syrian in
plan and containing many Hellenic quali-
ties, is also touched by Lombard influences.
Pisa is the direct prototype of that very beau-
[74]

THE GREAT AWAKENING

tiful round-arched style of the Italian thir-
teenth century which is the true " Gothic "
or Mediaeval expression of Italy, rather
than the superficially Gothic incidents that
are so generally unsuccessful and are usu-
ally taken to express this particular period.

This combination of Greek and Syrian
influences is what one would have expected,
for Constantinople and Syria were still the
leading centres of culture in the world,
apart from the Arabs, who, as infidels, were
formal enemies. During the era of the
Ottos the connection between the Empire
and the East was very close, while southern
Italy was still an appanage of Constanti-
nople. The Empress Theophano was a
daughter of the Eastern Emperor, wife of
Otto II and mother of Otto III. In her
train came artisans and artists of all kinds
from Constantinople, and great stores of
woven and embroidered stuffs, metal work,
and carved ivories. Great as was this in-
fluence from the Bosporus, that which fil-
tered in from Syria was of equal magnitude,
and, at least so far as southern France was
concerned, even more penetrating and per-
manent in its effects.

All through the Dark Ages Syria was the
[75]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

most fertile and wealthy province of the
Eastern Empire and the Syrian merchants
were the chief Mediterranean navigators.
Through Marseilles and Aries these mer-
chants with their ivories, stuffs, jewels, and
wines, worked their way into all parts of
Gaul and even into the valley of the Rhine,
making permanent settlements not only in
the towns of Provence but in Worms, Metz,
Cologne. One rather gathers from St.
Jerome and Salvianno and Gregory of
Tours that they were somewhat of a nui-
sance, as they were clannish, industrious,
and inordinately avaricious. Whatever
wealth there was seems to have been largely
concentrated in their hands, but at least
they played a powerful part in the develop-
ment of art when it began to recover itself
in the eleventh century, though their con-
tributions were purely decorative, and had
little to do with the great structural revo-
lution that was begun by the Lombards,
continued by the Normans and completed
by the French.

Certain of these decorative importations

may well be the norm of definite Gothic

devices, as, for example, crockets, which

were long supposed to be Teutonic in their

[76]

THE GREAT AWAKENING

origin, but which are to be found in Caro-
lingian illuminations almost copied from
such Syrian manuscripts as the Rabula
Gospels. The twin flanking towers of the
west front of churches may be traced di-
rectly back from Coutances and York
through the Norman abbeys, to Como and
Sant' Ambrogio, and through ivories, gems,
and miniatures of the fifth century and of
Syrian workmanship, to Syria itself, where
they form the established type.

The second school is that of Lombardy,
interesting, vital, and significant. If San
Pietro, Toscanella, is really eighth century
even in part, it is one of the earliest build-
ings of this style, though its strikingly
beautiful fagade must be credited to a
period nearly five centuries later when it
attained its highest point. The church at
Agliate is a century later and San Vin-
cenzo in Prato, Milan, of the same date,
i.e. the first half, of the ninth century. Then
in steady progression come such architectur-
ally and archaeologically important monu-
ments as Sant' Eustorgio, Milan; Santo Ste-
fano, Verona; Sant' Abondio, Como; San
Flaviano, Montefiascone; and Sant' Ambro-
gio, Milan. Now, the earliest of these are
[77]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

of the Dark Ages, and in them is no sign
of life or invention, but from Sant' Eus-
torgio onward the churches I have named
are all of the eleventh century and in one
or the other may be found the earliest stages
in the working out of many of the structural
features that conditioned the Gothic style
of architecture. Here, in this brief space
of time, we may find the full development
of the compound pier from the cylindrical
column, the alternating system, the concen-
tration of loads and thrusts with their neces-
sary buttresses, the pointed, ribbed, and
domical vault, and even the beginnings of
the chevet itself.

This development of the original ba-
silican plan and organism until it finally
culminated at the hands of other races
and far in the north, was somewhat as
follows:

The supply of ancient marble columns
being exhausted, circular or square piers
built up of small stones were substituted.
At about the same time arches were thrown
across the aisles from each pier to the outer
wall, possibly for aesthetic reasons, more
probably for purposes of stability. In any
case they involved the addition of a pilaster
[78]

THE GREAT AWAKENING

to the pier to take the arch on its inner side,
and so the first step toward the compound
pier was accomplished. Next, great and
high arches were flung across the nave,
partly for stability, partly because of their
beauty. These arches were either on every
third pier, as at San Miniato, or on every
alternate pier. In either case an additional
pilaster was built on the pier that bore the
nave arch, so making it cruciform, while
the intermediate support, having less work
to do, was made smaller. Thus the alter-
nating system of the late Norman and early
Gothic was begun, while the scaffolding
had been prepared for the next innovation,
which was masonry vaulting. This began
first in the small areas of the side aisles, and
was plainly groined, without ribs. Almost
immediately the structural convenience of
ribs was either rediscovered or remem-
bered from the Baths of Diocletian, or
copied from Syria, and after this the whole
scheme of Gothic construction was inevi-
table. The ribs made elaborate centring no
longer necessary, since they were built first
and then the spaces simply filled with thin
stones from the haunch upward. This sim-
plification made the high vault possible, and
[79]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

this at first was quadripartite, or just the
space of two of the aisle arches. Which was
the first ribbed and pointed nave vault is
a question that is archaeological rather than
architectural. That it was not earlier than
1025 or later than 1075 we are reasonably
sure. The vault of Sant' Ambrogio is of
the year 1060 and so perfect it is surely not
the first. Venturi, Stiehl, Lethaby believe
this ribbed, pointed, and domed vault to be
a Norman invention, and others claim that
Durham in England is the first. It does
not really matter, the feat had been accom-
plished, and that is really all we need to
know.

Already we have a definite concentration
of loads on certain points, and aesthetic rec-
ognition of this new principle. This in-
volved a new scheme of buttressing, for
while the thick Roman walls of the aisles
had served to take the thrust of the trans-
verse aisle arches, the nave arches, particu-
larly when stone vaults were added, were
a different matter. Naturally the first step
was to build transverse walls across the
aisles, piercing these with arched openings,
as at Sant' Ambrogio. This is as far as the
Lombards went; the flying buttress was the
[80]

THE GREAT AWAKENING

final structural refinement of the Normans
and the Franks.

The chevet, the development of which
is an interesting and rather special story, I
shall take up later. The Lombards ven-
tured a few tentative steps in this direction,
but the real work was apparently done far-
ther north, and is twelfth century rather
than eleventh.

jEsthetically the Lombards were as suc-
cessful as they were structurally. The great
glory of the style they had initiated was to
come in the twelfth century in the churches
of Modena, Pavia, Parma, Murano, and in
the thirteenth century in Pisa, Lucca, Pis-
toja, but even in the eleventh century the
self-restrained simplicity of the ordinary
exteriors, with their narrow pilaster strips,
corbelled cornices, simple round-arched
windows, and primitive apse arcades, is very
notable.

It is an interesting and a significant fact
that as in the north the rebirth of culture
and civilization is directly traceable to the
great spiritual awakening that took form
and shape in Cluny, so here in Italy the
growth of a new art is consonant with a
similar religious revival, stimulated by
[8iJ

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

Cluny itself, though following a somewhat
different and less permanent form of devel-
opment. Cluny was based on the " com-
munity spirit " and was made up of
self-contained groups of men united under
one rule. In Italy the horrors of the tenth
century drove thinking and righteous men
out of the world and into the wilderness as
hermits, and though the influence of these
pious anchorites was enormous it was per-
sonal only and could not outlast their lives.
St. Nilus of Calabria and St. Romuald of
Ravenna are types of the holy men of the
time, and the latter, says Villari, made
Ravenna for a time almost a rival in sanc-
tity of Cluny itself. Princes, patricians, a
Doge of Venice, St. Adalbert of Bohemia
(who was martyred by the heathen Prus-
sians he had laboured to convert) sought in
the far solitudes release from the intoler-
able oppression of social degeneration; and
they, with Gerbert, Bishop of Ravenna
after 998, exerted a vast influence for good
on the second and third Ottos as Holy
Roman Emperors. St. Romuald, in fact,
had hopes of inducing Otto III to renounce
the crown of empire and become a hermit,
but for once he failed, and this prince, who
[82]

THE GREAT AWAKENING

through his enlightenment and spiritual fer-
vour might have been the regenerator of
Europe in its civil aspect, died at the age
of twenty-two, followed two months later
by Pope Sylvester, Otto's counterpart in the
Church, and disorder reigned again. The
impulse had been sufficient however, and
now in Italy, as in Normandy, to quote the
contemporary monk, Rudolf of Cluny, " It
was as though the earth, rousing itself and
casting away its ancient vesture, clothed
itself with the white robe of churches."

The third school is that of Normandy.
It owes nothing to the neo-Grec episode
of Tuscany, but it took over all the Lom-
bard school and, striking out for itself, by
the vigour of the new northern blood and
the impulse and insistence of Cluny, as-
sembled it all, organized it in a splendid
coherency, carried each new thing to a
logical conclusion, supplemented these by
additional devices of the highest genius, and
finally handed the whole noble work to the
Franks and their Cistercian guides to be
raised to the highest point of logical articu-
lation and given that distinct and unique
aesthetic quality that fixed in everlasting
form the Gothic style.
[83]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

In searching for the earliest beginnings
of this era-making work we are grievously
handicapped by the gross and wanton sacri-
lege of the French Revolution. Innumer-
able great works of the noblest art suffered
total destruction during the eighteenth
century anarchy; amongst them three of
unique value both artistically and archae-
ologically: Cluny, Saint-Benigne of Dijon;
and Saint-Martin of Tours. A fourth in
the sequence, Jumieges, was also shattered
and laid desolate by the same sans- culottes,
but fortunately still remains as a majestical
ruin, while Cerisy-la-Foret was by some
miracle overlooked.

The name and personality of the first of
the great line of builders, and himself the
greatest of all, are known and should be
honoured by all architects. William of Vol-
piano was born in 961 on a little island of
Lake Orta in Italy. When very young he
became a monk of Cluny, then at the age of
twenty-nine Abbot of Saint-Benigne, Dijon,
and a few years later, at the personal solici-
tation of Richard II of Normandy, Abbot
of Fecamp. Filled with the most ardent
zeal for the reformation of morals, both
secular and religious, he was apparently a
[84]

THE GREAT AWAKENING

master builder — or, as we should say,
architect — of amazing ability. The lost
abbey of Dijon was his work, also the
abbey church of Bernay (now desecrated,
partially razed, and used for all manner of
base purposes), Frutuaria in Italy, and a
number of destroyed and less important
monuments. The original abbey church at
Mont-Saint-Michel was constructed during
his lifetime and under the direction of his
disciple, Abbot Hildebert II; Cerisy-la-
Foret by the famous monk Durandus, also
a disciple, and by Almodus, who had been
clerk of the works at Mont-Saint-Michel.
Jumieges, if not his actual creation, was
built under his influence by yet another apt
pupil, Robert II, then abbot, and after-
ward both Bishop of London and Arch-
bishop of Canterbury. Finally the preg-
nant transitional work of the early twelfth
century was under the inspiration of Lan-
franc, who, born at Pavia in 1005, became
a monk of Bee in 1042, only nine years after
the death of William of Volpiano.

The loss of Saint-Benigne is irreparable:

it marked the first advent in the north of

the Lombard principles ; it formed the point

of contact between Italy and France, and,

[85]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

judging from its foundations, which are all
the revolutionists have left us, and from
most defective drawings, it was an unique
stage in the development of the Gothic
chevet. It was a T-cross basilica, with apse
and flanking absidioles; a great circular
church or rotunda adjoined it to the east,
and by two rings of columns was divided
into a central well with two vaulted gal-
leries, while again to the east was a quad-
rangular chapel forming the tomb of the
saint. The importance of this building can-
not be overestimated, and a glance at the
conjectural plan will show how, in the year
1002, it amazingly foreshadows the fully
developed cathedral of the thirteenth cen-
tury. Undoubtedly its resemblance to the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusa-
lem links it also with the school of Syria.

Bernay, constructed in 1013, is the true
beginning of the Norman style, lofty, mas-
sive, masculine: a Latin cross with deep
chancel (instead of the Italian T-cross),
with compound piers and archivolts, ambu-
latories in the thickness of the walls, and
the full order of arcade, triforium, and
clerestory, though the triforium arches were
later blocked up. Mont-Saint-Michel is
[86]

THE GREAT AWAKENING

next in order, and proceeds in richness and
articulation beyond Bernay, from which it
was copied, while here for the first time
the walls are reduced in thickness and but-
tresses are substituted — a vital change, the
significance of which is inestimable.

Cerisy-la-Foret and Jumieges supple-
ment each other, for in the former the west
front and towers, with five bays of the nave,
have been destroyed, while in the latter the
original apse was supplanted by an elabo-
rate chevet in the fourteenth century, and
this wholly disappeared at the Revolution,
leaving hardly more than the nave and
west front structurally intact. These two
churches are momentous in the history of
architectural development. Cerisy is artic-
ulated beyond everything achieved before;
it is a Latin cross with a polygonal apse,
wide transepts, and aisled nave and choir.
It looks to be of the same date as Saint
Georges de Boscherville, and therefore later
than Jumieges, but this does not help us
much, since it is not sure whether the
former church is of 1050 or mo. It cer-
tainly is more delicate in design than
Jumieges, but on the other hand the aisles
and triforia of Jumieges are vaulted, which
[87]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

is a sign of increasing confidence and ability
on the part of its creators. Rivoira is ex-
plicit in his statement that it was conse-
crated in 1032 and that Durandus was the
architect: on the other hand Rupricht
Robert dates it 1150, and Porter comes be-
tween with a guess at 1130. From the evi-
dence of the building itself I should incline
to the very end of the eleventh century. In
any case it is a very noble work of art with
many elements of transcending importance,
e.g. the alternating system with transverse
nave arches at every other pier, the apse
with three stories of windows and wall pas-
sages at the two upper levels, and the finely
developed square central tower. If it is
earlier than Jumieges, it is the first church
in the north to adopt the Lombard trans-
verse arches across the nave, — the first step
toward the Gothic high vault and the sex-
partite form; if later, then the same is true
of Jumieges, which was certainly built in
1040. In both cases all the previous steps
toward the development of the Gothic sys-
tem have been brought together, while the
proportions have become lofty and noble,
the parts admirably related, and the whole
infused with a certain poetical quality
[88]

THE GREAT AWAKENING

hitherto unknown. I am persuaded that
Jumieges originally had alternating trans-
verse nave arches, like Cerisy, though I be-
lieve no one has suggested this before. Its
western towers are of extraordinary beauty
of composition and outline, but the end of
the nave between is crude and undeveloped
and is, I imagine, something left over from
a much earlier church.

We are now ready to go on to the de-
velopment of the true Gothic style, and in
doing so I shall deliberately transfer to the
next lecture consideration of the Norman
churches of Lanfranc and after, for even
if they fall within the eleventh century and
are in themselves the crowning of the Nor-
man style, they are also precisely those
structures in which the principle of dead
loads is being transformed into that of con-
centrated weights and living thrusts, there-
fore an essential part of the development
of the earliest Gothic.

First, however, a word should be given to
two other local types of architecture in this
very wonderful eleventh century, though
neither ever had any distinctive influence
in the later and perfected art of Europe.
These are the Venetian school and that of
[89]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

the Rhine. In Venice the weaving of the
" white robe of churches " gave us that im-
mortal concentration of beauty, San Marco,
through an apparently deliberate rejection
of both the Ravenna and the Lombard
schools and a return to Byzantium, for the
church itself was a fairly close copy of the
Church of the Holy Apostles of Justinian.
This strong Eastern influence persisted in
Venice quite through the Middle Ages, re-
sulting in a local architecture of exquisite
beauty, secular as well as religious. By
some sport of fancy the same model was
followed at Saint-Front, Perigueux, while
the Venetian influence extended to Padua
on the mainland, and across the Adriatic to
the Dalmatian colonies. Beautiful as it all
was it was outside the line of European
development, and whenever, as at Padua,
it tried to adapt itself to other conditions
it lost all vitality and rapidly died in a con-
dition of dull inertia. Later, in Sicily,
under the stimulating influence of the Nor-
man conquerors, similar Byzantine motives
were adopted with brilliant results, but
here also the effect was confined within the
island walls and did not extend itself either
geographically or in point of time.
[90]

THE GREAT AWAKENING

In the Rhineland the year 1000 brought
the same revival that it miraculously seemed
to confer on the rest of Europe. Otto III
was emperor, the Italian influence increas-
ingly powerful, while Cluny was as opera-
tive as elsewhere. As we have seen, the
Syrian element was strong all through the
Rhineland, the Empress-Mother, Theo-
phano, had all the love for beauty of her
native East, while much of the Comacine
work of Charlemagne was still standing as
a series of models. In general the eleventh
century building was not notably differen-
tiated from that in Lombardy, Burgundy,
and Normandy, and such a church as St.
Michael's, Hildesheim, is quite capable of
holding its own with the best these countries
could show during the first quarter of the
eleventh century. The same is true of
St. Maria im Capitol, the plan of which is
quite unique, with apsidal terminations for
the choir and both transepts and aisles en-
tirely encircling all three, this being the
first record of aisles carried along both sides
of the chancel and around the apse as well.
The apsidal transepts were copied once or
twice later, but they never became popular.
This is true of all the Teutonic contribu-
[91]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

tions to contemporary church building.
From the time of the Abbey of St. Gall it
had been a German fashion to duplicate the
eastern apse at the west end of the church,
and sometimes the transept also : the result
was a composition without unity or focus,
and the miscellaneous collection of towers
that inevitably followed produced a chaotic
and unimpressive effect Nothing of this
extended itself either to France or England,
and after its first efflorescence the Rhenish
style froze into the dull severity of Speyer,
Worms, Mainz, and Coblenz, a severity
that broke up outside into an unintelligent
chaos of towers, spires, and domes encrusted
with mechanical and uninspired detail.

In itself the church building of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries in the Rhine-
land lacked all spontaneity of structural
development: ingenious in devising new
combinations of apses, towers, and arcades,
it contented itself with this, and with the
construction of cathedrals impressive be-
cause of their colossal dimensions. The
universal problem was, however, the per-
fecting of a scheme of construction that
should be logical, organic, highly articu-
lated, and, a little later, economical. All
[92]

THE GREAT AWAKENING

the materials were at hand, gathered from
Syria, Ravenna, Constantinople, Rome ;
they had been analyzed, assorted, developed
into new significance and assembled into
units already showing a life and movement
unknown for five centuries. The next step
after development of detail and co-ordina-
tion of effort was creation, and high-
heartedly the men of Normandy and
Burgundy and France and England set
themselves to their task.

[93]

LECTURE IV
THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION

IN my last lecture I considered the bril-
liant achievements of the first great builder
of the eleventh century in the north, Wil-
liam of Volpiano, and of those who imme-
diately carried on his principles. We now
must turn to a second figure of equal archi-
tectural significance, Lanfranc of Bee, who.
carried still further the .ideas of the great
master and was his immediate and most
able successor. Like William he was an
Italian, born in Pavia in 1005. At the age
of thirty-four he went to Avranches, where
he established one of the many schools of
this fertile time, but almost immediately
abandoned his educational work for the
cloister, and became a monk of Bee in 1042.
The result was momentous, for at once this
minor monastery became the intellectual
centre of Europe, drawing professors from
every part of the west, and students in such
numbers that the old buildings proved in-
[94]

THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION

adequate, and were at once replaced by
magnificent new structures designed by
Lanfranc himself — so far as we know his
first essay in architecture.

It may seem to you that I disprove my
own contention when I admit that the two
great architectural masters in northern
Europe in the eleventh century, the very
men who took over the Lombard innova-
tions and not only co-ordinated them but
gave them a new and transcendent character
as the logical steps toward an inevitable
Gothic, were not men of the north at all
but Italians, and you may say therefore that
it is to Italy and the classical south, not
to Normandy and the Catholic north, that
credit should be given for this era-making
work. It should be remembered, however,
that the real creative ability in Italy was
Lombard, i.e. of that region where the old
Latin race had been almost wholly super-
seded by northern, and semi-Norse, semi-
Teutonic tribes, and that William of Vol-
piano and Lanfranc were both undeniably
of this alien blood. On the other hand it
is sure that this northern force, so vast in
its vigour and potentiality, would never
have become operative but for the fertiliz-
[95]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

ing power of the indestructible classical
tradition which had lain fallow through the
centuries of devastation, only to assert itself
with something of its old vigour when con-
ditions had become favourable.

It is impossible too strongly to emphasize
the persistence and the beneficence of this
classical heritage, which from time to time
asserts itself through alien races and in alien
times. It came with power in the tenth
and eleventh centuries, again in the four-
teenth and fifteenth, and it is no hard task
for us, today, to see its recrudescence again
after the powerfully Teutonic epoch of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ever
since the Latin tradition was apparently
stamped out forever under the trampling
of Teutonic conquest, it has been those
peoples who were earlier under its civiliz-
ing influence that have come forward as
centres of culture and of creative force, and
of social dynamics. Italy, Spain, France,
Britain, the Rhineland, all are coheritors of
the classical tradition, and Russia herself
owes her religion, her philosophy, and her
art to that eastern Rome on the shores of
the Bosporus that, before many days, may
become the capital of a restored and even
[96]

THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION

more glorious Byzantine Empire. The
eastern half of Germany, Hungary, and
Scandinavia are the only countries of Eu-
rope that never knew in any degree the
influence of Latin culture and civilization,
and the lack can never be supplied from
any human source whatever.

Again, we may admit that the blood of
the Mediterranean races had exhausted
itself and was no longer able to utilize its
own tradition. Of its own motion the
clean blood of the northern tribes could
probably have done little, but the combin-
ing of the two forces, raised to creative ac-
tivity by the inspiration of a vital, personal,
and beautiful religion, resulted in a living
force of unexampled potentiality, and the
result was the culture and the philosophy
and the art of Medievalism.

William and Lanfranc, then, were the
bearers of a great wonder out of Italy, but
it was the lusty Normans and the ardent
Franks who gave it form and life.

Not one stone remains on another of
Lanf ranc's new buildings at Bee, and of his
abbey of the Trinite at Caen only the crypt
exists, as the present church is the result
of a rebuilding half a century later. The
[97]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

£

Abbaye aux Hommes, or St. Etienne, at
Caen, therefore stands as Lanfranc's first
undoubted work. The easterly portion was
consecrated in 1077, the western in 1081,
and it was built (together with the original
Trinite) by Duke William of Normandy,
the " Conqueror," in expiation of some of
his rebellions against ecclesiastical inhibi-
tions. There is a tradition that the second
of these churches records the remorse of
the impulsive duke for his harshness to his
Duchess Matilda in parading through the
streets of Caen with the lady tied by the
hair to the tail of his horse, as an evidence
of his annoyance at her domestic conduct.
This story probably does grave injustice
to William as well as to the manners of the
time, even though these were more forcible,
direct, and unconventional than happened
at a later date.

This church, while following generally
the type of Jumieges, is a long step in ad-
vance, both structurally and artistically. It
is a vast Latin cross, with a high and fully
developed triforium gallery roofed by an
half barrel vault, compound piers of richly
multiplied section and on the alternating
system, central and western towers, and, for
[98]

THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION

the first time (if we assign to Cerisy-la-
Foret its probable later date) a conscious
effort at giving to the exterior decorative
architectural quality and some expression
of inner organism. For the first time also
we find the three west doors given an archi-
tectural character, and forming the first step
toward the ultimate glory of the typical
French west portals. The crude sexpartite
vaulting of the nave is of the twelfth cen-
tury, for while Lanf ranc evidently intended
to vault his church throughout, his courage
or his workmen failed him, and he had to
be content with a wooden roof, possibly with
alternating transverse arches as at Jumieges
and Cerisy. St. Nicholas, Caen, is also
Lanfranc's work: here the choir was actu-
ally covered by ribless cross vaulting; the
triforium is much reduced in importance,
as later at the Trinite in Caen and Saint
Georges de Boscherville, and finally — after
a reUirn to the earlier form — in the
standard type of Gothic church, while the
architectural treatment of the exterior is
still further developed in articulation. Saint
Georges de Boscherville is of the same genus
and follows after, probably in the very last
years of the century or the first of the next.
[99]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

In spite of the most shocking " restora-
tions " of the end of the nineteenth century
which have transformed its interior into a
whitewashed and mechanical horror, Saint
Georges is — or was — a church of great
nobility and finesse of proportion. Its ar-
cade is lofty and fine in form, its triforium
low and cut into a level arcade by close-set
shafts and narrow arches; the tribunes of
the transepts are beautifully designed, while
the exterior is admirable in mass and logical
and vigorous in detail. The apse was
originally vaulted with a simple half-dome,
and the choir with plain, unribbed cross
vaulting; the present nave vault is of the
thirteenth century, but originally it was
spanned by great arches, not, as before, on
alternating piers, but on all, so forming a
stage of development toward the oblong
vaulting, as opposed to cross vaulting or
sexpartite, of the Gothic church.

It is in England, however, that Lanf ranc's
greatest works were realized. This is emi-
nently fitting since the successful invasion
of England by his duke was due more to
him than to anyone else, for it was his bril-
liant mind and indomitable will and soaring
ambition that used the courage of William
[ ioo ]

THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION

as its tool and in the end made of him a
great statesman as well as a daring adven-
turer. To England Lanf ranc went, now as
Archbishop of Canterbury, and there, by
the year 1077, he had built a new cathedral,
some portions of which still remain incor-
porated in the vastly extended and many
times rebuilt metropolitan church of Eng-
land. Lanf ranc's work was evidently more
or less a replica of St. Etienne, Caen. St.
Alban's followed immediately, but here
native workmen were apparently used for
the first time, and everything is rude, un-
learned, and primitive: every hint of Lom-
bard craftsmanship and Norman ingenuity
is absent; old materials, Roman and British,
are used over again, and nothing of Nor-
man genius shows itself except in the huge
proportions and the fine directness and sim-
plicity of it all. Lincoln and Winchester
were built at the same time, but little of the
original work is left after the many re-
buildings, except the transept of the latter,
which, though ruder than the work in Nor-
mandy, is rich and massive in its pier sec-
tions and sets the fashion for the great
abbeys of the succeeding century. The
eleventh century portions of Ely show im-
[101]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

proved craftsmanship and various interest-
ing minor diversions from the Norman
type, amongst them the inclination away
from multiple piers toward the great cylin-
drical shafts of stone later so popular at
Durham, Tewkesbury, and Gloucester. It
is at the last church, and also at Norwich,
that we first find in England the two-story
ambulatories around the choir, with a small
group of radiating chapels.

The number of great churches built in
England between the Conquest and the end
of the century was something prodigious,
and their dimensions followed suit. The
English abbeys of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries were the largest structures in
Christendom, and fine as they were when
first built they never seemed adequate, but
were extended, remodelled, and rebuilt for
two centuries after a most extraordinary
fashion. In their fabulous number and
their unheard of dimensions they serve to
give some idea of the part played in the
Middle Ages by the monks who made them,
and of the place religion held then in rela-
tion to the people. To these monastic in-
stitutions must be added great numbers of
cathedrals and parish churches, and as a
[102]

THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION

result we are bound to realize that during
this entire period not only was organized
religion the chief power in the community
and the State, but also that it must have
been the intimate and personal interest of
every member of society. As a matter of
fact the parish was in England the social,
and in many ways the political, unit. In the
parish councils the lord of the manor was
hardly more than one of his tenants. As
the chancel belonged to the parson, so the
nave was the property of the people, who
were bound to keep it in repair and who
were as jealous of their duties as they were
of their privileges. As Bishop Hobhouse
says, "The parish was the community of the
township organized for Church purposes,
and subject to Church discipline, with a
constitution which recognized the rights of
the whole body as an aggregate, and the
right of every adult member, whether man
or woman, to a voice in self government."
The roots of liberty and free democratic
government, as these have come down to us
in theory (though hardly in practice), are
to be found far deeper in the old parish of
the Mediaeval Church than in Parliament
or folkthing or shire-mote.
[103]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

From Apostolic days down to a few cen-
turies ago the Mass was for all Christians
a matter of holy obligation, and in every
English parish church Mass was said daily,
and several times on Sunday. The " Chris-
tian year " also, with its unending round
of varied festivals and fasts and its com-
memoration of equally varied saints (to
some one of whom each Christian had his
own personal devotion), interpenetrated the
lives of all the people with an insistence
and an individual appeal never equalled
before or since. As for the seven Sacra-
ments— Baptism, Confirmation, The Lord's
Supper, Matrimony, Penance, Holy Orders,
and Extreme Unction — they accompanied
everyone from the cradle to the grave, link-
ing each life into the Christian fabric by
indissoluble bonds and giving a spiritual
significance and sacred character to every
event in the life of every man.

The monasteries were never more than a
day's journey apart in any direction, and
were therefore an ever-present element in
life. With the cathedrals they were the
great centres of art and beauty in every
form, more than adequately taking the place
of the art galleries, libraries, opera houses,
[104]

THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION

theatres, and " movies " of the present day,
since in them art was alive, operative, and
the possession of all. Each had some shrine
where precious relics of saints or martyrs
were venerated, and the whole country was
threaded with pilgrim routes, crowded with
devotees who were apparently as jolly as
they were devout. These religious houses
were the greatest landlords in the realm and
their tenants were envied by those who were
under secular landlords, since they them-
selves were more generously treated in every
way. Education, mercy, medical science,
charity, hospitality, and all the arts were
centred in these religious houses, which also
acted as trustees and guardians for orphans
and minors. They were therefore not only
necessarily large to accommodate the monks,
lay brothers, scholars, guests, and servants,
but often vast because of the enormous part
they played in common life and the incred-
ible throngs that came to them for worship
and to claim their ministrations.

It is hard for us to think back into such
an alien spirit and time as this, and so un-
derstand how, with a tenth of its present
population, England could have supported
so vast and varied a religious establishment,
[105]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

used as we are to an age when religion is
only a detail for many, and for most a neg-
ligible factor. We are only too familiar
with the community that could barely sup-
port one parish church, boasting its half-
dozen religious organizations, all together
claiming the adherence of only a minority
of the population, but in the Middle Ages
religion was not only the most important
and pervasive thing, it was a moral obli-
gation on every man, woman, and child,
and rejection, or even indifference, was un-
thinkable. If we once grasp this fact we
can understand how in the eleventh cen-
tury the whole world should cover itself
with its " white robe of churches " and why
also their desecrated ruins should so often
still manifest the vestiges of the greatest
and most universal art the world has ever
known.

This work of William of Volpiano and
Lanfranc, which we have been considering
only too briefly, is of course very rightly
called Norman; but I think it a mistake to
place it in a category by itself and treat it
as an intermediate style that came quite to
an end to give place for Gothic as a new
and independent creation. Instead of this
[106]

THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION

sequence of quite individual styles there
was, I believe, a swift, steady, and logical
progress from William of Volpiano's van-
ished church at Dijon, through Jumieges,
Caen, and the English abbeys of the Nor-
man Conquest, to St. Denis, Noyon, Paris,
and Chartres, and so to the full flower of
Amiens, Coutances, Rheims, York, West-
minster. The impulse was one, the goal
always the same, but from time to time new
influences were brought to bear on the
process, and at one definite moment these
were so numerous, so potent, and withal so
novel that the course of events was not only
accelerated but deflected from its original
course, the result being the Gothic style.
To appreciate these influences we must con-
sider for a moment the twelfth century in
its relation to its predecessor and its im-
mediate successors.

The eleventh century burst unheralded on
a degenerate and hopeless Europe, but the
twelfth was the onward and upward rush
of that unparalleled energy already initi-
ated and foreordained to a high destiny
hitherto unequalled. The great principle
of human association through manageable
social units, that after the end of the great
[107]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

dream of world empire had manifested
itself through Benedictine monasticism and
the feudal system, now extended itself even
more widely and took shape in the parishes,
the village communes, the guilds of traders
and artisans, the great schools and colleges,
and the lay orders of knighthood. Every-
where men came together in brotherhoods,
both secular and religious, and for a cen-
tury or more Europe was organized on a
socialistic basis which is the only possible
model for similar movements, now or in the
future, and which succeeded just in so far
as it differed from our own contemporary
socialistic schemes, vainly designed to effect
the same ends. The twelfth century was
more truly democratic than any society be-
fore or since, if we consider democracy to
consist, not in miscellaneous machinery and
vicissitudinous panaceas, but in certain ends
of right and justice. Today, abandoned as
we are to the frantic invention of the en-
gines and machinery of democracy, and to
the devising of novel and startling nostrums
for the curing of our manifold ills, we have
wholly lost sight of democracy itself and
have even forgotten in what it consists.
Naturally, therefore, it is as hard for us
[108]

THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION

to comprehend the vital democracy of the
Middle Ages as it is to understand the part
played by religion in the civilization of the
same period. Both, however, are funda-
mental, and I do not think it possible for
anyone either to appreciate or to understand
the art of the time without some recognition
of them as basic facts.

Perhaps one reason why the democracy
of the twelfth century was so successful is
that it never failed for leaders, since de-
mocracy without high personal leadership
is a dead thing that can end only in anarchy,
or in that domination by the worst of its
elements that finds its nemesis in the inevi-
table reaction to despotism. The naming
of all the great leaders of the time would
run to the term of this lecture, and one can
do no more than note a few in each cate-
gory, as for example, amongst the kings,
Lothair II, Charles the Fat, Henry Plan-
tagenet, Richard Coeur de Lion, Philip
Augustus, Roger of Sicily, with such vivid
female personalities as Matilda of Tuscany,
Eleanor of Guienne, Blanche of Castile.
Amongst the great constructive leaders of
thought who were brilliantly forging the
wonder of Catholic philosophy were St.
[109]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

Anselm, St. Bernard, Abelard, William of
Champeaux, Peter Lombard, Hugh of St.
Victor. In religion we find St. Robert of
Molesme, St. Norbert, St. Thomas a Becket,
Peter the Venerable, with, just at the end
of the century, the great Pope, Innocent III.
And the following was worthy of the
leadership : not only was this, as I have said,
the era of the guilds and communes, the
great schools and universities, the military
orders of knighthood, it was also the age
of increasing art in every category: of
music, through the trouveres and trouba-
dours, and the chansons de gestes; of poetry,
through the forming in final shape of the
legends of Arthur and of the Holy Grail;
of architecture, through the transforming
of Norman into Gothic. If ever the elan
vital rose to inordinate heights of untram-
melled creation, it was then ; and this vivid
vitality seemed to overflow itself in every
category of mental and physical and spirit-
ual activity. The development of the sys-
tem of sacramental or Catholic philosophy
is a sufficient exemplar of the first, the
career of the Norman adventurers of the
second, while the Cistercian reformation is
typical of the third. It is only now, in these
[no]

THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION

last days, while our own chosen system of
evolutionary philosophy is falling in ruins
around us, that we are beginning to think
back beyond Herbert Spencer, beyond
Kant, beyond Descartes, beyond St. Thomas
Aquinas himself, to that very wonderful
system that finds perhaps its best exposition
in Hugh of St. Victor, and to discover there,
in the midst of the twelfth century, a body of
illuminating philosophy that is to the Chris-
tian world what Plato was to paganism.
As for the bodily activity of inordinate
adventure, there is nothing more stimulat-
ing than the story of the Hautevilles, the
eight sons of a poor gentleman of Nor-
mandy, five of whom proved themselves
conquerors of the first degree, winning in
Sicily and southern Italy estates for them-
selves as well as thrones, now and again, for
their descendants. Of course all their com-
peers were doing the same sort of thing; —
conquering England, the Holy Land, even
gaining the throne of the Eastern Empire;
but the hardy Hautevilles are the best ex-
ponent of Norman force, since they show
how, in a single family, the ardour of ac-
tion is not confined to one alone but extends
itself through all.

[in]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

Of the Cistercian reformation I must
speak more at length, since it was the chief
agent in effecting the change from the Nor-
man to the Gothic principle in architecture.
Monasticism, of the type established it
would seem, once for all, by St. Benedict
of Nursia in the sixth century, is an essen-
tial element in Christian civilization, re-
curring ever and again when the things
against which it contends have achieved
supremacy and brought society to the point
of ruin. In the sixth, the eleventh, and the
sixteenth centuries it had its most brilliant
manifestations, and already it is preparing
again for its identical office of social regen-
eration. It is, however, human in its con-
stitution, and subject to the general law of
degeneration, therefore it is constantly laps-
ing from its ideals, its standards, and its
prescribed modes of action. If its work
is not accomplished before this inevitable
retrogression sets in, then another order
comes into existence to continue the labour
under a new impulse of righteousness. The
work of the Middle Ages was not accom-
plished before the Order of Cluny, that had
made the Normans the most potent forces
in Europe, surrendered to the gravitational

[113]

THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION

peril of the world, and became rich, self-
indulgent, morally lax. By the end of the
eleventh century the Benedictines of Cluny
had made the art they had re-created a
thing of luxury, splendour, and inordinate
expense. Cathedrals, abbeys, and churches
were vast, massive, elaborate in design, opu-
lent in sculpture and colour and gold. The
vestments for the sacred offices, the altar
vessels and ornaments, the Mass books and
shrines and reliquaries were of a Byzantine
luxury in their wealth of gold and silver
and precious stones. Art took the place of
ethic; ease and luxury and license came in
the stead of self-denial, holy poverty, and
missionary zeal. Nevertheless the work
was only half done; therefore St. Robert
of Molesme was moved to a reform that
should be a return to Apostolic righteous-
ness and zeal, the Order of Citeaux being
the result. It was a glorious return to the
Benedictinism of St. Benedict himself, and
at once old men and young flocked to the
Cistercian monasteries in such numbers that
fathers and mothers and wives tried to hide
or place under restraint the boys and men of
their families in order that they might not
yield to the overwhelming call of the clois-
[113]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

ter. Within a few years of the founding,
St. Bernard became a monk of the new
order, and then the situation became worse,
for now men were neither to hold nor to
bind, and secular society was decimated.
The result was not, however, what might
have been feared by the eugenists of the
time (if there were any), for the imposi-
tion of the law of celibacy on tens of thou-
sands of the best of both sexes could not
depress the standard, and character waxed
even finer and more vigorous for several
generations.

The effect on architecture was immedi-
ate and fundamental: hitherto, with all its
magnificence it had been structurally static,
a style of inertia. In the Roman basilica
the principle of dead loads held practically
throughout, for the thrust of the narrow
aisle arches was negligible, that of the tri-
umphal arch taken up by the lateral walls
of the transept, that of the dome of the apse
by its own thick walls. The domical church
of the East was indeed active in every part,
but with little concentration of thrusts, and
the varied and incessant push was met by
counteracting masses of inert masonry and
walls of enormous thickness. The same
[114]

THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION

principles held in Normandy and England :
as arches widened in span the walls grew
thicker and more massive, the abutments
more ponderous. With the adoption of
cross vaulting of masonry the resulting con-
centration of weight and thrusts was ignored
and the intervening wall areas were thick-
ened equally with the local abutments.
Five-foot walls became almost a minimum,
and the thickness was sometimes increased
up to eight or ten feet. Of course the re-
sult was the necessity of providing huge
masses of masonry, expensive in themselves
and very tempting to carvers and decorators.
It cannot be denied that these vast and
massive structures have a power and dig-
nity all their own, — as, for example, Peter-
borough, Ely, Durham, — and they were
so well liked that in England they gener-
ally resisted the advent of the new Gothic
fashion of construction, while accepting its
outward forms, and for this reason English
Gothic achieved little of the structural logic
and economy of France. On the whole,
however, the magnificent Norman style was
intolerable to the Cistercian puritans, and
at their instigation the master builders of
the time strove to find a solution that, while
[115]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

sacrificing nothing of beauty, should yet
reduce the initial cost. The success of this
effort was triumphant, but it was due to
the entrance into the field of a new racial
element different alike from the Italianized
Lombards of the south and the Christian-
ized Vikings of Normandy. This new ele-
ment was that of the Franks of the He de
France, who, under the spur of the Cister-
cians, brought to bear on the structural
problem the acute intellect, the creative in-
genuity, and the unfailing logic that were
their everlasting contribution to the great
and glorious unity we know as the French
people. Under their hands architecture
was made over, for their quick wit and
ready ingenuity soon showed them that by
concentrating loads, thrusts, and abutments
they could reduce the bulk of their masonry
by half, and furthermore, that there were
certain physical laws that might be discov-
ered by experiment, if not on a priori
grounds, and that these laws might be used
to determine lines of energy, weights of
resistance, and factors of safety. In a word
they brought pure science to bear on the
question, not as master but as servant, in
which respect they differed radically from
[116]

THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION

the devotee of science of today. In time
the whole thing turned into a game, and
the master builder became obsessed by his
science, to the peril of his art as well as of
his buildings themselves, but for an hun-
dred and fifty years the just balance was
maintained before Beauvais closed the
chapter in calamity.

The ribbed and pointed vault had already
been worked out, and so had the two forms
of sexpartite vaulting, in the abbeys of
Caen. The next step was the adoption of
the oblong vault area. In the Abbaye des
Dames the vault, though comparatively late,
is undeniably a survival of the earliest form
of high vault, for it is simply a great inter-
secting vault of equal sides, the transverse
crown being reinforced and supported by
an arch with its spandrels filled in by a thin
wall of stone — manifestly an evidence of
doubt on the part of the builders as to the
stability of so large a quadripartite vault
as is necessary to span a nave always twice
the width of the aisle. Incidentally it is
also a first step to the oblong area. The
vault of the Abbaye aux Hommes is a
clumsy approach to the true sexpartite
vault, for here the masonry springs back
[117]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

on either side from the intermediate wall
to meet the main curves of the square
vault, so forming exterior wall surfaces
into which an arched window would ac-
commodate itself without offence. Of
course, as soon as the oblong areas which
naturally followed from the perfected sex-
partite form were generally adopted, the
alternating system was given up, and the
regular order of Gothic columniation de-
termined for all time. Simultaneously the
device of stilting was introduced, whereby
sharply pointed arches were avoided and
the full thrust of the vault brought to bear
along a single vertical line above the vault
shafts — a thing as beautiful as it was me-
chanically perfect, for it resulted in that
warping of the vault surfaces which is one
of the most subtle charms of French Gothic
architecture.

The problem of receiving these concen-
trated thrusts had been partially solved in
Normandy: the old Roman device of huge
masses of masonry, or rather transverse
walls, adopted at Sant' Ambrogio, had been
abandoned, and in his Abbaye aux Hommes
Lanf ranc had substituted the half of a barrel
vault running the length of the aisle and
[n8]

THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION

abutting against the nave wall. This was
effective but illogical, for only a small part
of the buttressing arch received any thrust
whatever. Almost immediately, therefore,
as in the Abbaye des Dames, the intervening
areas were cut away and only the arch at
each pier remained. This of course was a
true flying buttress, but it was still concealed
below the aisle roof, hence the clerestory
was restricted in height to the wall area
of the vault alone. At Noyon, about the
middle of the century, and apparently for
the first time, the abutting arch emerged
into the open air and the flying buttress with
all its possibilities had come into its own.

We have now, you will perceive, nearly
all the elements of the Gothic organism : the
cruciform plan with wide transepts and
deep choir, the vertical order of arcade,
triforium and clerestory, pointed arches,
ribbed and stilted vaults with oblong com-
partments, concentrated loads and thrusts,
direct abutments, with the flying buttress
in posse, and the intervening walls reduced
by half in thickness; articulation expressed
by compound piers and arches, with vault
shafts well grounded from vault to floor,
lofty proportions, complex compositions of
[119]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

light and shade. All this has worked itself
out in the interior of the church; outwardly
little change is apparent, for Gothic growth
was exclusively from within outward, as it
was essentially a logical and an organic
growth. We have, it is true, even at Jumi-
eges, the great west towers, with the other
over the crossing always favoured in Nor-
mandy and therefore in England even to the
end of the Middle Ages, but apart from
such large and general forms the exterior,
even of almost fully developed Gothic struc-
tures, still remains, to all intents and pur-
poses, that of a Norman church.

In the meantime the great architectural
idea of the chevet, or polygonal apse with
its single or double encircling aisle and
radiating chapels, forming as it does the
great structural and artistic glory of the
style, and the point where, intellectually,
all the vivid logic of the French master
builders shows itself at its highest per-
fection, had been slowly evolving after
a curiously entertaining fashion. When
the domical church of Constantinople,
Ravenna, and Aix-la-Chapelle was finally
superseded by the western and more ancient
basilican plan, it was not wholly abandoned,

[120]

THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION

for its possibilities were too great. First
of all, the final form of a domed polygon
surrounded by a vaulted aisle with shallow
projecting bays or apses, was cut in halves
and added to the cross-shaped basilica; then
it was subjected to the process of concen-
tration, articulation, and scientific refine-
ment that was taking place in the remainder
of the fabric, and we obtain the astonishing
sequence: a Roman calidarium, Bosrah,
Ravenna, Aix-la-Chapelle, St. Martin at
Tours, St. Germer de Fly, St. Denis, Char-
tres, Amiens, and Le Mans. A very inter-
esting, evidence of the plausibility of this
theory, not, I think, heretofore noted, is the
apse of the abbey church at Essen, dated
about 1040, which is simply three sides of
Charlemagne's chapel at Aix applied to the
end of a Romanesque basilican church. We
still lack, of course, the Gothic spirit as it
showed itself aesthetically, and without this,
no matter how highly developed may be our
Gothic structural form, we have not the
whole of Gothic, for this is a spirit as well
as an organic system of building. The ef-
fort has been made — as I believe, both
unwisely and unsuccessfully — to confine
the word " Gothic " exclusively to that
[iar]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

work which is perfect in its structural sys-
tem and its organic form, according to the
highest point reached at any time in these
directions. This mechanistic and even
pedantic method of criticism is of the nine-
teenth century type of analytical and mate-
rialistic mentality, and I doubt if it can
maintain itself much longer. Gothic con-
struction is indeed the most highly articu-
lated, the most vividly intelligent, and the
most scientifically exact ever devised by
man, but it is only a part of Gothic archi-
tecture, which is as well the expression of
an entirely new social and devotional spirit,
engendered by a peculiar, beneficent, and
dynamic energy in the world of the west,
and expressed through new forms of beauty
that have no historic prototypes. The
greatest Gothic monuments are such as
Chartres and Amiens and Rheims, but all
other structures, whether civil or secular,
produced between 1 150 and 1400 under the
influence of Mediaeval culture, by the races
of the north, are equally Gothic, whether
the full structural system is present in all
its integrity, or only indifferently, or even
not at all.

The sequence of development as recorded
[122]

THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION

in existing buildings is approximately this:
Bury, St. Leu d'Esserent, St. Germer de
Fly, St. Denis, after which Gothic is fully,
firmly, and finally developed. The space
of time involved is from 1125 to 1140,-
surely the most astonishing fifteen years in
architectural history. In the nave of Bury,
begun in 1125, we find the pointed arch
used consistently, with ribbed, stilted, and
oblong vaults, all handled clumsily and with
hesitation, but with undoubted conviction.
St. Germer de Fly, begun five years later,
is almost as amazing a portent as was Jumi-
eges for its own time, for it was appar-
ently without a prototype, yet here we find
all the elements of Bury handled with per-
fect assurance, and as well a complete ar-
ticulation of shafting, a chevet very well
worked out, the second story gallery re-
duced to the limits of a true triforium, and
all the loftiness of line and grace of propor-
tions that we associate with perfected
Gothic. Its flying buttresses are still con-
cealed below the triforium roof, therefore
the clerestory is largely blank wall with
small pointed windows confined between
the spring and the crest of the vaults. Out-
wardly the church is still sturdily Norman.
[123]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

Five years later the great Abbot Suger
built his fine new Abbey of St. Denis, leav-
ing us, fortunately, a brilliant and enthusi-
astic account of his aims and his methods.
The church was consecrated in 1140; it
was immediately followed by Sens, Noyon,
Paris, and Laon, and stands, therefore, as
marking the point when the vital new tend-
ency reached its fulfilment and Mediaeval-
ism achieved its perfect form of expression.
Of the original work of Suger only the west
front and the ambulatories of the chevet
remain, for a century later all the rest of
the church was rebuilt in the fully devel-
oped Gothic manner, forming one of the
great examples of the perfected style. From
what remains, however, and from the ad-
mirable old abbot's proud narrative, it is
evident that at last all sense of hesitation
and uncertainty had disappeared; Bury and
St. Germer de Fly took their places as the
last of the Norman mode in which the spirit
of the new Gothic was working hiddenly;
St. Denis itself crossed the dividing line and
became the first of the great sequence of the
monuments of Catholic Christianity that
ended only with the advent of the new
paganism.

[124]

THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION

It was not that any new devices were in-
troduced, for there were none to be dis-
covered ; it was rather that the power that
was working for self-expression at last ac-
quired its adequate master craftsmen who
worked now with confidence and convic-
tion, with a high intelligence irradiated by
a kind of divine inspiration, refining and
perfecting, articulating and co-ordinating
all that a century of devoted and progres-
sive effort had brought to their hands.
Now first the Gothic spirit bores itself
through from within, outward, the last of
the old static Norman is consumed away,
and the great progress begins that was to
find its apotheosis, just an hundred years
later, in the Cathedral of Our Lady of
Rheims, destined to stand in all its unap-
proachable majesty century after century,
while the spirit that had created it died
away amongst men and the new power in
the world worked its will amongst all na-
tions and all peoples; destined at last to be
given into the hands of those who best had
learned the lesson of this new power and
applied its methods, who blasted it with
their own consummate engines of destruc-
tion and left it shattered, scorched, and
[125]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

desecrated, but with its eternal fabric still
intact. Even so, under the same assaults,
the everlasting power that brought it into
being still stands, shattered, scorched, and
desecrated, but, like Rheims, ultimately in-
destructible, and destined again to redemp-
tion and regeneration.

[126]

LECTURE V
THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS

I HAVE tried in the last two lectures to
show how, first in Lombardy, then in Nor-
mandy, and all within the limits of a cen-
tury, the essential structural elements of a
potential Gothic were being invented or re-
discovered, until at last, under Lanfranc,
the material was assembled and made ready
for that finger-touch of creative vitality that
was to transform a casual assembling into
coherency, and transfigure it with a new
spirit of unexampled power and of beauty
unapproachable. In the same way, as I
have endeavoured to make clear, an identi-
cal process was being followed in civil and
ecclesiastical society. Out of equal dark-
ness came equal light, and this new day
made possible the artistic transformation
that was now to take place. Feudalism had
created a new society made up of human
units linked by the human bonds of per-
sonal attachment and reciprocal duties and
[127]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

privileges. Out of this admirable social
scheme came an added impulse toward the
ideals of service, obedience, loyalty, honour,
chivalry. Monasticism had grown from a
protest into a world-wide agency of service,
rebuilding the ruined fabric of education
and art, creating anew a vast but always
human agency of charity, mercy, and hos-
pitality. The guild system, working on
from self-protecting alliances of traders,
had extended itself to every existing form
of industry and commerce, always, as in
other domains, of human and manageable
scale, until the workman held a position of
self-respect and of independence, with an
assurance of just and certain compensation,
such as he had never held before and has
failed to achieve since. In the south, where
the lingering tradition of a dead imperial-
ism prevented the normal development of
feudalism, the crescent spirit of independ-
ence and co-operation made itself visible
through the free communes or city-states,
where again the basis of association was
human in its scale in place of the vast
material aggregate of force and military
power of the preceding epoch, and of the
vague abstractions of political dogmatism,
[128]

THE MEDIEVAL SYNTHESIS

philosophical theory, and empty shibbo-
leths of that which was to follow.

The ardent and restless spirit of the north
had opened up new lines of pilgrimage and
adventure through Europe, across the Med-
iterranean, into the mysterious fastnesses of
Africa, Arabia, Syria, the Levant, even into
the frozen north of the heathen tribes, and
the wonder of a doubly mysterious Asia.
The crusades had stirred the spirit of Nor-
mandy, Flanders, France, the Rhineland,
England, and opened up new possibilities
of adventure, conquest, treasure, commer-
cial gain, while the paynim principalities
in the south and the decadent empires of
the East were a living incentive to the ex-
panding vigour and the overriding ambi-
tion of the uncontrollable races of the north.

With the humanizing of society came an
identical humanizing of religion and of
philosophy. During the patristic days the
Church had been so busy in determining
in exact form the verbal symbols of essen-
tial dogma, and in beating down one plau-
sible heresy after another, that the natural
process of devotional development had been
held back, and the latent humanism in the
original deposit of the Faith came but
[129]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

slowly into view and operation. For five
centuries, however, the humanizing process
had been going on, and by the opening of
the thirteenth century the Church had
adapted its system of worship to the eternal
and unchangeable demands of the human
soul, until it met these at every point. I
do not mean to say that anything novel in
doctrine was added; it was rather that new
spiritual possibilities were revealing them-
selves through dogmas and practices exist-
ing from the beginning, and that new forms
of devotion grew up to intensify the appeal
of doctrines that dated from the time of the
Apostles themselves. For example, the in-
vocation of the saints and prayers for the
dead are recorded even in the catacombs
and were a part of original Christianity;
now, however, the new impulse of human
and personal relationship took hold of the
ancient doctrines and established a sense of
intimate kinship between the individual on
the one hand and the hierarchy of angels
and archangels, the saints and martyrs, the
dead of every family, on the other. This
new spiritual intimacy served to bring the
divine and the unseen down closer to earth,
while lifting man and his common life into
[130]

THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS

closer communion with the whole company
of heaven. In the same way the Mass had
been, certainly since the post- Apostolic age,
both Communion and Sacrifice; now, how-
ever, the latter quality was increasingly em-
phasized and the inevitable corollary of the
sacramental presence of Christ in the con-
secrated species resulted, in the time of
Charlemagne, in the clear enunciation of
the doctrine of Transubstantiation, though
the final definition was not to be determined
for many centuries.

An identical process was going on in
philosophy, whereby the aloof and abstruse
orientalism of the Eastern and Alexandrian
schools, and the massive yet precise intel-
lectualism of St. Augustine, were being
fused in a comprehensive sacramentalism
that was at the same time definitive, since
it was an intellectual approximation to an
intelligible exposition of the fundamental
law of all life, and of unusual appeal
through its perfect adaptation to the needs
and desires and aspirations of the human
soul. This singularly human yet equally
exalted philosophy seems to me to find its
full flower in Hugh of St. Victor, with
St. Anselm and St. Bernard as particular
[131]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

exponents of certain of its more limited
aspects.

The dominating influence, then, which
determines and emphasizes Medievalism,
is a very real humanism that is in fact the
antithesis of that fictitious humanism of the
Renaissance which has usurped the name.
It moulds and transmits and fixes in definite
form every thought and action of the time,
and is as fundamental in controlling artistic
development as in establishing the nature
of the religion, the philosophy, the social
system of the Middle Ages. While it re-
sulted in the most perfectly balanced
scheme of life that is of record, it was by
its very nature peculiarly susceptible of
abuse. As the inevitable tendency of mys-
ticism is ever further and further away
from the earth into the impalpable ether,
until Hugh of St. Victor is merged into
St. Bonaventure and so into Hildegarde of
Bingen and Fritz Thauler: as the inevitable
tendency of pure intellectualism is from St.
Thomas Aquinas ever lower and lower
through Calvin and Herbert Spencer to the
impossible nadir of Haeckel, so the tend-
ency of humanism is toward that disas-
trous point when all spiritual things are
[132]

THE MEDIEVAL SYNTHESIS

reduced to the level and scale of man him-
self and there is no longer any distinguish-
ing between the two. Then comes anthro-
pomorphism, the debasing of worship to
the level of a series of charms and formulae,
the purchase and sale of sacraments, indul-
gences, dispensations; the invention of crude
and vulgar devotions, with loss, in the end,
of spiritual consciousness and even of the
very sense of right and wrong.

As a matter of fact, much of all this re-
vealed itself progressively through the lat-
ter Middle Ages, and what had been its
glory became its shame. As, however, you
cannot judge monasticism after the nine-
teenth century fashion, from its incidents
and episodes, and final estate of degrada-
tion, but rather by its great epochs when it
was in the full flower of its splendour and
beneficence, so you cannot judge the Middle
Ages from their decadence. What they
became after 1305 when the secular power
regained control of religion, does not con-
cern us here. The architecture we are con-
sidering was the exponent of the culture
and civilization of Medievalism while it
was still young and vigorous, or in its ma-
jestic maturity. This period lasts, roughly,
[i33]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

from the year 1000 to 1300, a space of three
centuries, one half of which is the era of
youth and endeavour, one half of accom-
plishment and an only too brief supremacy
before the inevitable decline.

I may confess now what you already will
have discovered, viz.: that I have under-
taken an impossible task in endeavouring
to concentrate into six hours not only the
art of six centuries but as well something
of the spirit and the power that lay behind
it. I can now hardly more than refer in
the most superficial way to the pregnant
events of this amazing time, leaving those
of you who are interested, perhaps, to find
in Henry Osborne Taylor's " The Mediae-
/ val Mind," Dr. Walsh's "The Thirteenth
Greatest of Centuries," and Henry Adams's
" Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres," the
secret revealed, as in no other books I know,
of the dynamic force that took shape in a
system of life and thought the perfect ex-
pression of which is the art, and especially
the architecture, of the central century of
the Middle Ages.

Two hundred years of varied monastic
influence toward righteousness had at last
resulted in a redemption of the Papacy that
[134]

THE MEDIEVAL SYNTHESIS

made it, through the great pontiff, Inno-
cent III, the controlling power in Europe,
and Innocent himself a kind of spiritual
Lord of the World. All kings were ulti-
mately subject to him, even Philip Augus-
tus of France, whose domestic irregularities
wrought an issue between them that was
salved only by royal surrender. As Inno-
cent was followed by such worthy succes-
sors as Gregory IX and Boniface VIII,
so Philip of France was followed by
Louis VIII and St. Louis, the last of whom
has well been called " the ideal of a loyal
knight and a Christian king." And there
were great kings in all the world : Frederick
Barbarossa, Frederic II, Edward I, Robert
Bruce, Rudolph of Hapsburg, Ferdinand
III, Alphonso the Wise. Learning and edu-
cation ascended by leaps and bounds; the
universities rapidly made themselves a
greater force than the monasteries that had
created them, and philosophy, through Al-
bertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon,
Raymond Lully, Alexander Hales, and,
greatest of all, perhaps the most supreme
intellect of all time, St. Thomas Aquinas,
reached a height of almost inconceivable
achievement. Arts that had struggled
[135]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

toward the light during the preceding cen-
tury reached their culmination, and arts
long forgotten were born again. The union
of music and poetry at the hands of the
meistersingers and minnesingers and of
those of the creators of the great Latin
hymns (the latter a new art altogether)
lifted both arts to new and exalted levels,
while pure music became perfected in the
Gregorian mode. In Siena and Florence
painting was reborn in Duccio, Cimabue,
and Giotto, while sculpture, restored in
France a century before the Pisani in Italy,
achieved a fruition that placed it on the
same plane as that held by the sculpture of
Hellas. So this incredible century pro-
ceeds, and at the end all is gathered to-
gether in Dante, the eternal synthesis of
Medievalism.

Great as was the thirteenth century in
constructive statesmanship, in the fixing of
the principles and the laws of civil liberty,
in philosophy, and in the development of
all the arts (whether the old arts of paint-
ing and sculpture and poetry or the new
of stained glass, hymnology, illumination),
its achievement in architecture was in some
ways the most notable, perhaps because
[136]

THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS

what happened there epitomizes all that
was done elsewhere, and the nature of what
was accomplished is precisely that which
informed the whole body of Mediaeval
achievement.

We have seen how nearly all the struc-
tural elements of Gothic already had been
brought into being; what remained was the
Gothicizing of it all, the giving it essen-
tial Gothic quality. This may, I think,
be divided under three heads, Cohesion,
Economy, and Character. The first means
knitting everything together synthetically,
giving it a certain dynamic power to grow
from within outward in accordance with
clear laws and under one impulse, and
finally making structure itself, not only effi-
cient as such, but beautiful in itself, the
central fact and force in the style, all or-
nament of every kind being something
added, but growing inevitably from it.
Economy means the discovery of physical
forces, using them in such a way that they
work either together or in intelligent and
effective opposition, so making possible the
reduction of columns, walls, arches, but-
tresses, vaults, to a logical minimum, but
always with regard to that optical mini-
[137]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

mum which prevented a reduction in bulk
below a certain point, even if a further
diminution would be structurally safe, since
the mind must be satisfied, through the eye,
and the physical test could not be consid-
ered as final. Character is the hardest thing
to define, but in a way the most significant.
It is the quality that makes a thing Gothic
whether its structural system is of the per-
fectly developed type or not. It is what
the glass of Chartres, the sculpture of
Amiens, the pictures of Giotto, the Hora
Novissima, the High History of the Holy
Grail, all possess in common with the great
cathedrals, and in so full a degree that they
may all be called Gothic, or Mediaeval, or
if you like Catholic. Singly and together
they are the creation and the expression of
the one epoch when Catholicism interpene-
trated all life to such an extent that no
single portion of society except the Jews,
the Mohammedans, and the as yet uncon-
verted tribes of Prussia, were outside its
scope or beyond its influence and control.
Character means for us difference in qual-
ity, and this is both material and spiritual.
Saint Georges de Boscherville has, for ex-
ample, almost as many Gothic elements in
[138]

THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS

its construction as the Cathedral of Sens,
but the one is essentially Norman in char-
acter, the other just as essentially Gothic.
The character of the mouldings in Cerisy
is of one type, that of Noyon absolutely dif-
ferent, and the same is true of the scheme,
the material, and the detail of design. The
ornament of the later Norman and Roman-
esque is rich and elaborate beyond Gothic
comparison, until the fifteenth century, but
it differs as completely from that of Char-
tres or Amiens or Lincoln as it does, on the
other hand, from that of Greece. The plac-
ing of ornament, also, is wholly different,
and a new theory of composition grows out
of a new energy.

What is it that determined all this, and
in thirty years gave to architecture a new
character that it retained for nearly three
centuries? It is, I think, that sudden
achievement, by certain peoples, of their
majority. Into the golden chalice of life
are poured, from a score of flagons, the
streams of living water; little by little the
chalice brims higher and higher, and at last
- at one moment it is full but continent, at
the next it overflows. Blood of the North,
religious fervour and devotion, a new and
[139]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

fine economic system, a stimulating philos-
ophy, liberal education, personal freedom,
sense of honour, chivalry, service, all as-
semble to the filling of the cup, and between
1150 and 1175 it brims to the full, runs
over, and a new stylistic epoch in architec-
ture is accomplished.

Behind and through it all is the new
humanism. Our Lady and the saints are
friends and defenders, and their service is
the pleasure and the duty of chivalry. The
world is seen to be very beautiful, with its
flowers and its birds and kind little beasts
of the woods. Personal allegiance and
friendship, and an almost mystical rever-
ence for women bind all kinds and classes
with close bonds. Men are free, and as
freemen, brave and laborious: the guilds
make all work honourable and give each
man his chance of self-expression and emu-
lation. All environment is beautiful, all
costumes full of life and colour, men are
imbued with the beauty and the splendour
of religious and secular ceremonial, ugly
things disappear and more and more lovely
things take their place. Unconsciously men
have come to like good things and to make
only good things, and the race — not the
[140]

THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS

patron, the amateur, or the isolated artist,
— expresses its own and intimate self.

In the last lecture I came with you down
to that final quarter of the twelfth century
where at St. Denis and Sens, Gothic archi-
tecture had shown itself in all its potential
force: from them we go straight to Notre
Dame in Paris; for here, working from east
to west, we can see the process of complete
development.

The great church was begun in 1 163, only
twenty years after St. Denis, the choir of
course coming first, and the work gradu-
ally extending itself westward until the
fagade with its towers was finished in its
present state in 1235. The plan is fine,
clear, and well articulated, but the vertical
order is and always was defective. It fol-
lows the Norman Abbaye aux Hommes and
has a lofty vaulted gallery in place of the
low triforium of the Abbaye des Dames,
and is in this sense inferior to the somewhat
earlier Sens where the triforium is of very
great beauty. In Notre Dame, again, cylin-
drical columns are used for the nave arcade
throughout, the vaulting shafts resting on
their caps. I have never understood why
this device — a distinct retrogression in
[ 141 1

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

point of articulation — should be so much
admired by critics. At Sens this stopping
off the vault shafts occurs only on the in-
termediate columns, which is admirable,
since there the scheme is alternating and
the vault sexpartite, the piers carrying the
transverse ribs, and therefore the major part
of the weight, perfectly expressing their
function by being divided into five colo-
nettes, each of which takes a member of
the group of vault ribs, grounding them all
solidly at the pavement. The perfect sys-
tem is of course that at Chartres, and almost
invariable thereafter, i.e. a smaller circular
shaft with four attached colonettes, one
reaching from floor to vault and carrying
the transverse rib, one performing the same
function in the aisle, with those on either
side taking the inner ring of the moulded
arches of the arcade. The colonettes that
take the diagonal ribs of the high vault
are either stopped on the top of the ar-
cade cap, or better still at the base course
of the triforium, while the longitudinal
ribs find their support at the clerestory
level.

The nave must have been finished about
1196, and in 1210 the west front was begun
[142]

THE MEDIEVAL SYNTHESIS

and completed in fifteen years. About 1230
there was a serious conflagration, and at
that time the novel but unbeautiful round
windows above the triforium in each bay
were cut out to allow the lengthening of the
clerestory windows, and at the same time
the original and fine scheme of double but-
tressing in the chevet was abandoned for
the irrational and inorganic flying buttresses
leaping both aisles, and grieving the logician
as much as they excite the admiration of the
tourist. These same preposterous buttresses
are one of the first evidences of the inevi-
table danger that lurked in the scientific
proficiency of the French, who were always
trying for some new structural wonder and
only desisted when Beauvais, which they
had pushed even beyond the limits of rea-
son, collapsed in ruin, and, after an humili-
ating bolstering up by additional supports,
remained a vast fragment as the monument
to overriding ambition. Impossible as they
are, these buttresses, or rather these but-
tress pinnacles, are examples of the most
exquisite detail to be found in the style, and
here again we find a premonition of the
fate in store when the integrity of construc-
tion was lost and Gothic became the riot
[i43l

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

of marvellous decoration that is called
Flamboyant.

Between 1245 and 1250 the nave chapels
between the buttresses were constructed -
another serious error in judgment — and
the transepts were pushed outward a bay,
while at the very end of the century the
apsidal chapels were built, the ambulatory
originally having no chapels whatever.
Notre Dame stands as a living record,
therefore, of all stages of Gothic during its
first period, but no portion can match the
west front which marks the culmination of
the style. It is perhaps the noblest archi-
tectural conception of man, classical in its
simplicity, its matchless proportions, the
brilliancy of its design, the perfect scale of
its detail, the subtle rhythm of its delicate
variations.

Amongst the other great cathedrals es-
sentially of the twelfth century we find
Noyon, Laon, Senlis, Poitiers, Bourges, and
Chartres. It is impossible to describe them
now, for each deserves a lecture by itself.
Infinite in their variety, they are all under
the same inspiration. Laon has its perfectly
proportioned plan and its great scheme of
seven clustering spires; Soissons has its
[144]

THE MEDIEVAL SYNTHESIS

wonderful south transept which Porter
calls " one of the most ethereal of all
twelfth century designs and the highest ex-
pression of that fairy-like, Saracenic phase
of Gothic art that had first come into being
at Noyon." As for Bourges, it is unique,
and to me the finest Gothic interior in the
world, with its vast, transeptless nave, its
five aisles, and its pyramidal system of arch-
ing that lifts the nave arcade half as high
again in proportion as in any other church,
its glimmering forest of shafts vanishing
above in luminous shadow. Chartres of
course remains in the end the noblest work
of Gothic art, even though almost every
other church excels it in some single point.
In spite of the bewigged canons of the
eighteenth century who desecrated its choir
with cheap imitation marbles and its sanc-
tuary with a riotous high-altar that looks
like a Broadway burlesque, and then
smashed some of the matchless windows in
order that the world might see the results
of their stupendous crime — in spite of this
Chartres remains less wrecked within by
bigotry, revolution, the vulgarity of the
eighteenth and the restorations of the nine-
teenth century, than any other of the great

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

cathedrals, and it still retains the vast ma-
jority of its original glass, which is to this
art what the west front of Notre Dame is
to architecture — its final, perfect, and di-
vinely inspired word. Add to this blazing
vesture of apocalyptic splendour the south
tower of the west front, an unparalleled
model of serene design, inscrutable propor-
tions, and just composition; the porches of
the transepts, which have no prototypes, no
rivals, no possible successors, but stand as
the revelation through some unknown
master-masons of all that is final in in-
spired design, and finally the sculpture,
west, north, south, which leaves no further
word to be said in the sensitive adaptation
of this art to architecture, — combine all
these and add a certain poignant spiritual
aroma of the chanted worship and the old
incense and the ascended prayers of seven
centuries, and you have a thing that almost
transcends experience and can only be ana-
lyzed by Huysmans, only put into burning
words by so consummate a lover and artist
as Henry Adams.

The thirteenth century goes on from
Bourges and Chartres without a break to
Coutances, Amiens, and Rheims. It goes
[146]

THE MEDIEVAL SYNTHESIS

on to innumerable other masterpieces as
well, in England, Flanders, Spain, for de-
spite the many small nationalities, perhaps
because of them, Europe was practically an
unity, fashioned, expressed, and made active
through diversity. In France, however,
perfection was most closely approached,
and national, individual, stimulating as they
are, the Gothic monuments of all these
peoples never quite approached Chartres,
Bourges, Coutances, Amiens, and Rheims
in perfect organism, in perfect beauty, and
in the indissoluble union of the two. In
these masterpieces the progress of develop-
ment from the simple to the complex, from
the almost rudimentary norm of the Athe-
nian temple, each portion of which was
perfected to finality, on to the Catholic
cathedral of the thirteenth century, where
the norm is in itself complex and each de-
tail raised almost to the level of Hellenic
perfection, is steady and unbroken, and at
Rheims we could see, only two years ago,
the triumph of final achievement.

Coutances is not French Gothic, it is
Norman Gothic, just as the same art in
England — barring Westminster — is Nor-
man by descent. There is a great difference
[i47]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

in this, and one that always should be re-
garded, for it marks a great divergence and
lessens the contrast so often drawn between,
for example, Lincoln and Bourges. Cou-
tances has the might and majesty of the
work of Lanfranc, with the central tower
so typically Norman and English. On the
other hand its verticality is stupendous: it
soars into the air with a swiftness and clarity
of line almost without equal. The French
cathedral does not do this: there is in it
nothing ponderous, nothing earth-bound,
but it seems to rise with a certain self-
controlled majesty, expressing only its
splendid logic and its magisterial calm.
Coutances is like a troop of lifting spears,
light, strong, exultant, and its effect comes
from conscious design in form, not through
wealth of fretted ornament, for of this there
is little enough. As the chief monument
of Norman Gothic it is a church that well
deserves to be better known than it is.

It is as hard to speak of Rheims as of the
loved and newly dead. For every architect
it had come to be the epitome of his art,
the Parthenon of Christian architecture.
For every friend 'of France, every devotee
at the shrine of immortal history, it stood
[148]

THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS

as a radiant apotheosis. For those who still
hold by Christianity it was a holy place,
with a dim yet penetrating sanctity that
silently conquered all doubt, all denial, all
derision. There was none other quite like
it; not St. Peter's, nor Hagia Sophia; not
even Westminster. The insolence of heresy,
the brutishness of revolution, the smug self-
complacency of restoration had stripped it
of its altars, its shrines, its tombs of unnum-
bered kings, but even the destroyers had
venerated its lofty majesty and respected its
integrity, while the wars of six centuries
had swept around its unscathed walls, im-
potent for evil in the light of its stainless
glory.

For two years it has lain under the fitful
storming of shell and shrapnel, doomed to
slow death because it is the crowning sym-
bol of a great culture that is an offence to
modernism in arms, and of a spirit in man
and over man that may not be allowed to
exist in the same world with its potent nega-
tion. The glass that rivalled Chartres is
splintered in starry dust on the blood-stained
pavement and its fragments made the set-
tings in soldiers' rings. Its vault is burst
asunder by bombs, its interior calcined by
[149]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

conflagration, the incredible sculptures of
its portals blasted and burned away. Yet
it stands in its infinite majesty, gaunt and
scathed in a circle of ruin, still the majestic
fabric of a great people, a great epoch, a
consummate art.

It was the crowning monument, in mate-
rial form, of Christian civilization; so per-
fect in all its parts that it was perhaps too
perfect, as being more than man should be
permitted to attain, an infringement on the
creative power of God. Beyond this was
nothing greater, and in Amiens, which is
chronologically but a few years younger, we
already begin to feel the working of that
pride of life and vainglory of conscious
competence that forebodes the beginning of
the decline.

To most travellers, I suppose, Amiens is
the most beautiful cathedral in France, the
perfection of fully developed Gothic. Cer-
tainly its towering interior, taller in pro-
portion to its width than anything yet ac-
complished, is awe-inspiring; its sculptures
quite by themselves in their vivacity, their
masterly design, and their subtle delicacy
of execution. The west front, wholly with-
out stylistic consistency and dating from
[150]

THE MEDIEVAL SYNTHESIS

many periods, is lyric poetry done into
stone. There is no other Gothic front
quite like this in its pictorial composition,
its wealth of intricate design (as rich
as the masterpieces of the Flamboyant
period without their lace-like texture and
their irrational fantasticism), its marvellous
carved ornament which is undeniably the
most varied, original, and exquisite of any
church in the world. In spite of this
there is something lacking, or rather some-
thing added that should not be there. Very
hiddenly, very unwholesomely, human
pride is asserting itself above the solemn
devotion of Chartres, the serene Christian
confidence of Rheims. Logic is winning
the mastery, structural engineering is eating
into architectural integrity. Higher and
more tenuous the slim shafts lift themselves
from the pavement: in the marvellous
chevet stone is pared away until the thin
masonry is like a perilous scaffolding:
every foot of wall between buttresses gives
place to the airy tracery of great windows,
and the vault itself soars in the air as though
held down by the taut pull of the colonettes
instead of resting on them as on its natu-
ral supports. Of course the painted glass
[151]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

is nearly all gone, if it ever existed, and
the vast interior, whitened by lamentable
restorations, is a dizzy blaze of intoler-
able light. Were these crystal walls glow-
ing with the transcendental splendour of
Chartres, or with the glory that was
Rheims, our judgment might be different,
for then Amiens would be the fulfilment
of the dream of its daring creators, where
now it is little more than the white ashes
of burnt out fires. So great is the part
played in Mediaeval architecture by this
art of glass, created then out of nothing to
add a new joy to life, a new wonder to the
body of universal art. No church where
sacrilege has extinguished this flame of life
— and they are the vast majority in every
land — should be judged as it stands any
more than you would venture to estimate
the value of the Brahms Requiem from an
orchestral performance from which the
voices of the soloists and chorus were ex-
cluded, or the Fifth Symphony without the
violins. With our taste hopelessly debased
by the catastrophic products of glass-makers
in the nineteenth century, we naturally can-
not understand the part played of old by
this triumphant art, unless we have seen for
[152]

THE MEDIEVAL SYNTHESIS

ourselves the miracle of Chartres with its
glass so providentially preserved.

In any case, however, the lurking peril
was there ; not salient, not vociferous enough
to injure its perfection, not sufficiently visi-
ble to serve even as a warning, but the next
stage was the chevet of Le Mans, and the
final stage was Beauvais, and through these
we can trace the first evidences of deca-
dence back to Amiens, still serene in its
perfect mastery.

I have left myself scant space, indeed I
have left no space at all, to deal with the
other racial and national expressions of
Mediaeval culture through the varied ver-
sions of what was yet one definite Gothic
style. This is unjust to Spain and Portugal,
where a divergent Gothic showed itself
early and ended at last in the fantastic and
riotous fancies of Burgos and Poblet. It is
unjust to western Germany and Austria,
where, though late, a Teutonic version of
French Gothic produced a few really na-
tional masterpieces. It is unjust to Italy,
for though the true Gothic, such as the
ruined abbeys of Casamari and San Gal-
gano, are merely Cistercian importations
from Burgundy, the friars' churches of the
[153]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

sculptor Arnolfo not Gothic at all and very
ugly at that, and the pictorial fagades of
Orvieto and Siena merely delightful essays
in arbitrary design, there is a real Mediaeval
expression in the unique churches of Sicily,
with their mingling of Byzantine, Arab, and
Norman genius, and in the developed Lom-
bard of North Italy at Pisa, Lucca, Prato,
Pistoja. It is doubly unjust to England, for
there we find a school of undoubted Gothic
which is quite unlike that of France, yet in
spirit the same. The divergence is very
complete. As I said before, English Gothic
inherits directly from Normandy, not from
France, and is therefore always more
static, massive, and structurally conserva-
tive. Moreover there is a fundamental dif-
ference in genus due to the same difference
in the people. As opposed to the French
with their clear logic, which is sometimes
almost cruel, the English are incorrigible
sentimentalists, always thinking things are
better than they are, and that they can easily
make them better still by impulsive and
almost unpremeditated action. Apparently
we, ourselves, inherit directly from them
and are therefore hopelessly addicted to the
worship of abstract ideals which do not exist
[154]

THE MEDIEVAL SYNTHESIS

and would not work if they did, while our
incorrigible optimism prevents our ever see-
ing a danger (if it is clearly indicated for
the future), or of recognizing its advent
until the time for preventive action is past
and nothing is possible but the desperate
struggle for life.

So in England we find, in her Mediaeval
architecture, a curious clinging to estab-
lished precedents, a shrinking from novel-
ties in structural development, a more or
less complete carelessness of logic, a doing
of things because they like them that way
and not because it is necessarily the reason-
able thing to do. And yet, combined with
this is always a curious and very appealing
struggle toward the symbolical expression
of things almost too high for expression.
As the Norman abbeys are vaster, more
dramatic, and more overpowering than their
prototypes, with their massive construction,
their cavernous portals, their giant piers, as
at Gloucester, almost Egyptian in their pro-
portions, so with Gothic, when it became
the universal mode of expression. Vast
towers lift themselves at the west and over
the crossing; lancet windows prolong them-
selves upward to improbable heights; new
[i55]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

and irrational compositions are tried as in
the astonishing west portals of Peterbor-
ough, while the plan pulls itself out to in-
ordinate lengths, and doubled transepts and
great chapels prolong the awe-inspiring
vistas, and add space beyond space to the
blue mystery of nave and choir and aisles.
It is all very appealing, particularly to us
who are of the same blood and temper, but
it offers a tempting opportunity to the
mechanistic mind that thinks only in terms
of logic, law, and clean-cut definitions.

Of course it is true that we must judge
English Gothic by what is left, and this not
always of the best. What Henry VIII
could not destroy was sacked and wrecked
by the Puritan reformers, and what they
left the nineteenth century pounced upon
as prey for the " restorations " of Wyatt,
Lord Grimthorpe, and Sir Gilbert Scott.
Salisbury remains, with all its defects upon
its head, but Guisborough is gone; of the
great northern abbeys only fragments exist,
and St. Mary's Abbey, at York, which must
have been the most perfect Gothic in
England, after having stood roofless and
crumbling for three centuries, yielded in
the era of enlightenment, which is to say,
[156]

THE MEDIEVAL SYNTHESIS

the early nineteenth century, to the cupid-
ity of commercialism, and was pulled down
and burned into lime.

Some faint idea of the ruthless destruc-
tion of the noblest art that was carried on
under the direction of the " Defender of
the Faith " may be gained from Abbot
(now Cardinal) Gasquet's " Henry VIII
and the English Monasteries," but it is well
to have in mind that the nineteenth century
was even more ignorant and rapacious than
the sixteenth, though its devastations were
carried on with less violence, albeit with
equal effectiveness.

[157]

LECTURE VI

THE DECADENCE AND THE
NEW PAGANISM

I HAVE called this last of my lectures
" The Decadence and the New Paganism,"
but the title is incorrect as applied to all that
immediately followed the crest of a great
art as it manifested itself in Amiens, Lin-
coln, and Rheims. For a long time to come
it was to be a great art, gaining at one place
what it lost at another, and in England los-
ing nothing, but proceeding always on its
serene way until it produced the first truly
national style, that was still at its perfection
when suddenly cut off by the Reformation.
In society, however, the decadence was very
real, and its inception almost immediate.
When, in 1270, St. Louis, " the very perfect
king in Christiantie," went to his eternal
reward, the climax had been reached, more
man could not achieve than already had
been won, and, as always in history, the
curve began to decline.
[158]

DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM

Art did not follow this swift declension,
for it never does. While it is true that art
is engendered only by the power of a great
ardour and a great righteousness in society,
the impulse lasts long after the initial energy
is spent. The wave that first shows itself
in a low, long swell far out at sea, rising
as it advances, and cresting on the edge of
the shingle, to burst, fall, and disperse in
shallow ripples, only to be sucked back into
the abysses of the sea, casts, in falling, its
wind-blown foam far forward, until it
touches the very grasses of the shore. So
with each epoch of civilization and its art;
the curve of one is of longer radius, and
tangent to the other, continuing, before its
inevitable fall, long after the primal im-
pulse has ceased to act. This is why we
always find the highest achievements of any
art synchronizing with that low level of
ethics, of philosophy, of religion, of conduct
that follows the epochs of noblest culture
and most vivid and wholesome life.

After St. Louis and St. Thomas, after
Rheims and Dante, the curve was bound to
decline. Already a very unpleasant form
of heresy had raised its head in the south
of France; the Crusades had degenerated
[159]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

into marauding expeditions, and in the very
first years of the fourteenth century the
French crown had seized upon the Papacy,
establishing over it the secular control
Hildebrand had died to avert. " The exile
at Avignon " followed, with one after an-
other of the French agents acting as pontiff,
and in its trail came the " Great Schism " ;
a full century, in which secular control of
the Church demonstrated all the loss of
spiritual independence, all the paralyzing
of the power of the Church in the defence
of faith and morals, that is its inevitable
corollary. Abandoned by its secular and
spiritual sovereigns Italy lapsed at once into
anarchy and an encroaching barbarism: in
Germany the Empire broke down and a
new and vicious form of feudalism took its
place: the Hundred Years' War devastated
France and debauched the moral sense of
England, while the Black Death swept
Europe like a pestilential flood. Rebellion
broke out against the ordered government
of the European states, and once more the
waves of invasion threatened the almost un-
defended frontiers, this time in the shape
of Turks and Tartars. The Latin Kingdom
of Jerusalem fell, the fragments of the
[160]

DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM

Eastern Empire shrunk smaller and closer
under the endless assaults of Bulgars and
Turks, although in Spain the tide had
turned and Ferdinand III was steadily
crushing back the Moslems that at one time
had threatened all Europe.

It was a time of terrible choice, of criti-
cal peril, but as yet the day was not neces-
sarily lost. A Philip Augustus, an Otto III,
an Anselm, a Thomas a Becket, a Leo IX,
a Hildebrand, might have met the crisis
and theoretically at least have saved civi-
lization. Italy alone had definitely aposta-
tized from its Mediaeval ideals, Germany
and France were but in the first stages of
infection, while England was as yet wholly
immune and Spain vigorous with strong
new life. A firm hand in the Papacy, right-
eous kings in France and Germany, a new
Cluny or a new Citeaux, might have saved
the day. Instead Philip the Fair comes to
blight all St. Louis had brought into flower;
the earlier Hapsburgs could not avert the
nemesis of Germanic order prepared by the
last of the Hohenstaufens. The Mendicant
Orders, in spite of the best intentions in
the world, formed but dissolving bulwarks
against a tide that had broken helplessly
[161]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

before the inviolable ramparts of Benedic-
tinism, whatever its special form or name.
Inch by inch the virus engendered in Italy
during the time of its abandonment by the
Popes crept through the veins of Europe.
Northward it advanced without stay on that
progress that was not to cease until at last,
two hundred years later, it was to achieve
during the tyranny of the regents of Ed-
ward VI final supremacy over England, the
last stronghold of Christian civilization.

All this was happening darkly under-
neath, on the surface was a brave show
of culture and refinement. Chivalry was
flaunting its splendid pageantry from sea to
sea, and almost every year was born some
child who later was to be the voicing of a
great civilization only the dregs of which
remained to him. Nearly all the great
painters of Christendom were born in that
century that reached from the beginning of
the " Great Schism " to the election of
the Borgia — Alexander VI. With them
came the Blessed Jeanne d'Arc, Savonarola,
Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, Bayard, St.
Ignatius Loyola, St. Philip Neri ; but simul-
taneously those whose destiny it was to play
each his part in bringing a great epoch to
[162]

DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM

an end in ignorance, anarchy, and apostasy:
Machiavelli, Luther, Cranmer, Thomas
Cromwell, Henry VIII, and the spawn of
the house of Borgia.

It was a field of Armageddon; the armies
were drawing together, all the hosts of
Heaven waited expectant, and in the year
1453 the great battle began. Constantinople
fell before the devouring Turks, and over
Italy poured the flood of decadent philos-
ophy, evil morals, and false learning that
had festered there during the last years of
Byzantine corruption. It came in specious
and engaging guise: the spirit of the early
Renaissance (which was really Christian
and beneficent in so many ways) seized upon
it with avidity, wolfed it down, good and
evil alike, and was transmuted into a thing
profligate, atheist, anarchical. Nicholas V
and Pius II tried too late to stem the tide
and turn it into the channel of compromise.
They were followed by an Alexander VI,
a Julius II, and a Leo X. Savonarola, fight-
ing almost single-handed against the hell-
let-loose in Italy, went to his martyrdom.
Cardinal Cusa, St. John Capistran, and
Erasmus were swept before the whirlwind
unleashed by Luther and Zwingli. Calvin,
[163]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

Beza, and the Huguenots, acting in bloody
concert with Marie de Medicis and a Ca-
tholicism now almost wholly debauched by
Italy, turned France into a shambles. The
temporal victory remained with the Catho-
lics, but it was empty of righteousness and,
unchecked, the Renaissance went on its
course. At last the cliffs of England, that
had so long withstood the rising tide,
yielded to its assault, and Henry, Crom-
well, and Cranmer rose to triumph over Sir
Thomas More, Bishop Fisher, and the mar-
tyrs of monasticism. The exile at Avignon
had borne its fruit and Catholic civilization
had come to an end. What followed was
new: whether for good or ill is not to be
considered now, but it was in no sense
Catholic, and, whether for good or ill, the
Middle Ages were Catholic, first, last, and
always.

There was little enough of all this in the
architecture that followed immediately on
Amiens and Rheims. Beyond their organic
perfection there is no further field for
development, except along the lines of en-
gineering, and this becomes ever more bril-
liant and more daring. The chevet of Le
Mans is a degree beyond that of Amiens
[164]

DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM

in its delicacy, its complicated articulation,
and its beauty; a magical web of stone.
Beauvais passes the perilous edge, and as
even today, in the heyday of efficiency and
consummate engineering, the bridges of
able experts will fall now and then, so in
France experience rose superior to logic
and mechanism and made them of no avail.
Beauvais was taller than Amiens, more at-
tenuated than Le Mans, and twelve years
after it was finished it crumbled and fell
into its own nave. Rebuilt, with humiliat-
ingly necessary reinforcements, it acquired
new transepts that were finished in 1550,
and a central spire nearly 450 feet high.
Again ruin overtook it; the incredible spire
fell and was never again rebuilt, while the
nave had never even been begun; so the
cathedral remains a monument of the deca-
dence; truncated, patched up, semi-ruinous,
as Paris stands for the crescent years of Me-
diaevalism, Rheims for its culmination.

Beauvais is sheer beauty, unalloyed, and
therein lay its weakness. Its choir, as you
first see it, towering above the huddled
houses below, is so marvellous that you
catch your breath in awe and admiration.
It is not wire-drawn and frail like Le Mans,
[165]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

but composed of solid and almost unorna-
mented buttresses, lifting dizzily into the
air, and thin lace-like arcs springing one
above the other toward the crystal walls of
the clerestory. No finer conception exists,
and no more brilliant and poetic design.
As for the transepts, which were not begun
until the first years of the sixteenth century,
they are of the last Gothic of France at its
best, and this best was good indeed if you
consider it as pure decoration. Where this
new style, called Flamboyant, came from,
and why, is one of the architectural mys-
teries. The balanced art of Amiens con-
tinued along established lines for a genera-
tion, then froze slowly into a respectable
formalism that ceased suddenly when the
civilization that had created it perished for
the time being in war and desolation. For
almost a century art of every kind was in-
operative, and when it began again it was
on sudden and novel and, it must be con-
fessed, very captivating lines.

When St. Louis died, he left France rich,
powerful, happy. He himself had become
the most dominant prince in Christendom,
and there seemed no reason why his people
should not enjoy in peace, for generations,
[166]

DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM

the fruit of his noble and knightly labours.
Less than seventy years after his death, and
just a century after the consecration of
Rheims, the " Hundred Years' War " broke
out, and under the unrighteous scourging
of the English king, France was wrecked,
pillaged, devastated, and reduced to the
lowest levels of misery and humiliation.
All the north and east were swept by a
whirlwind of destruction almost like that
which has come on Flanders and Cham-
pagne during these latter years, only then
the cathedrals and abbeys and churches
stood inviolate, rising in the purity of their
new white stone, alone in the abomination
of desolation.

By the year 1270 architecture had become
largely stereotyped along fine but mechan-
ical lines, St. Ouen, Rouen, serving as a
good example, and no great original works
were attempted except Limoges, Narbonne,
and Alby. With the English war work
stopped altogether, and yet, after a space
of sixty years, and at the very moment of
the deepest humiliation of France, sud-
denly, somehow, came the flush of a new
art, as though to signalize the birth of the
girl who was to listen, alone amongst the
[167]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

people of her race, to the mystical Voices,
and, at the head of a regenerated army, lead
her king to his crowning in Rheims, and
redeem France. The Blessed Joan of Arc
was born in 1411, and seven years later
Notre Dame de PEpine was begun, the first
considerable example of the wonderful new
art that seemed to grow out of death and
corruption, as though men were sick from
inordinate misery and turned to beauty, as
they were turning back to religion, to find
there their only consolation. Caudebec fol-
lowed in 1426, St. Maclou in 1432, the tran-
septs of Beauvais in 1500 and the church
at Brou in 1505. It was a century of the
most exuberant worship of beauty: hardly
a church in France lacks some embellish-
ment of this period, for the coming of peace
in 1456 found a chastened people, who set
to work to express their new liberty and
their gratitude in the old and honourable
way.

Some say the artistic stimulus came from
Flanders, some even from England, which
in this instance deserved so little either of
gratitude or of imitation, but it seems to
me that there was material enough already
in France. What was done was the isola-
[168]

DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM

tion of the decorative and artistic forms
from their structural context, and the trans-
forming of these into a magnificent and
ingenious scheme of ornamentation. So
considered it offers little opportunity for
adverse criticism. It is a wonderful com-
plex of exquisite lines, supple, and flowing:
of crisp, close-set carving, of buttresses that
have been transformed into fretted spires,
of spires that become lace-like canopies, of
canopies that toss themselves like spray into
the air. In spite of its riotous abundance,
its whimsical fancy, its overwrought senti-
ment, it is always in good taste in France,
and usually in Flanders, though in Spain
and Portugal it rapidly became turgid and
ugly, while in Germany it ended by being
ridiculous.

From the first it grew steadily better in
France, and often reached heights of posi-
tive greatness, as in the Tour de Beurre of
Rouen, and in Malines cathedral. Notre
Dame at Louviers, St. Maclou at Rouen,
and Alengon are toys, but St. Germain at
Amiens is a consistent and admirable little
church, as are many others of the same kind
throughout the country. In almost every
case, however, the beauty is external : within
[169]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

the work is dry, thin, often ugly in propor-
tion, which is evidence of the great change
that has taken place in motive. Secularism
is dominant, wealth and luxury increasing,
and for the first time outside show takes
precedence of the worship of God. Beauty
is now sought for its own sake, not as divine
service, and the end is not far away. " Art
for art's sake " will serve for a time and
produce the show of aesthetic competence,
but it is impermanent as a motive force and
its ultimate degeneration and extinction are
not to be escaped.

In England the last phase of Christian
architecture was the exact antithesis of that
on the Continent. We already have seen
that the English Gothic was based on Nor-
man rather than on French foundations and
therefore static and conservative; curiously
enough it is emotional, as opposed to the
clear logic, the nervous energy of develop-
ment, and the intellectualism of France. It
passed through many phases from the Nor-
man William of Sens to the ultra-English
William of Wykeham, striking out concep-
tions of wonderful beauty, such as Netley
Abbey and St. Mary's, York, the eastern
transepts of Durham and Fountains, Lin-
[170]

DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM

coin choir and presbytery, Guisborough,
Exeter, Beverly. It devised those wide,
low compositions that are the charm of
English cathedral landscape; it created
towers of singular grace and nobility, and
west fronts of varied and novel majesty.
It invented and perfected the vaulted chap-
ter house and made the abbey and the coun-
try church models of almost faultless design.
It turned the simple and little-varied pro-
files of mouldings, and the somewhat stereo-
typed pier and arch sections, of France and
Normandy, into living forms of infinite
vitality and variety, and in its carved deco-
ration it has no rival. It is true Gothic of
a very personal and national character, but
it is not the greatest Gothic because it is
undeveloped in its structural organism.

At the very moment when French Gothic
had hardened into a series of formulae, that
is to say, the first quarter of the fourteenth
century, English Gothic took up an entirely
new line of development that was to give it
a fresh but evanescent glory. It began as
a scheme of decoration, with the remodel-
ling of the choirs of Gloucester and Canter-
bury, and of the Norman Winchester from
end to end. All this work is practically
[171]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

contemporaneous and runs from about 1350
to 1400. It is quite unstructural and con-
sists chiefly in a sheathing of thin stone,
where all the lines are predominantly ver-
tical, very numerous, and delicate to a de-
gree in their profiles and sections. The
revolt from the massive forms and strong,
rich lights and shadows of the earlier work
is startling. New forms of arch are de-
vised — three-centred, four-centred, ellip-
tical, segmental — and the vaulting, which
already had been marvellously enriched, as
at Exeter, with many intermediate ribs, took
on new shapes, on curious circular or curved
section lines, until it came to be known as
fan vaulting. Geometrical tracery gave
place to many vertical bars, with cross mul-
lions, and ingenious new line-combinations
for the heads, while ornament swerved
from the exquisitely naturalistic forms of
the thirteenth century and became conven-
tionalized and heraldic.

If we were to judge this nascent style
from its earliest efforts we should be forced
to condemn it as a piece of unstructural
artificiality, but no sooner had it made itself
fashionable, which it did at once and most
inordinately, than a curious thing happened.
[172]

DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM

Beginning as a scheme of surface decora-
tion, it proceeded to change its whole nature
and become logically structural, and so, at
last, England actually acquired a form of
architectural expression which was not only
quite original, but more consistent, as an
organic scheme, than anything that had gone
before. At once the old and almost cum-
bersome bulk of the Gothicized Norman
gave place to the nervous and completely
articulated system of Perpendicular. Col-
umns became slim and widely spaced, walls
were thinned to curtains and then to mere
veils of glass in a slender scaffolding of
stone mullions. The angular and ugly criss-
crossing of irrational ribs that had defaced
the vaulting of the latest Decorated and the
earliest Perpendicular work, disappeared,
and fan vaulting, delicately panelled, and
split into thin severies by sheaves of slim
ribs, took its place. The rich and sonor-
ous glass of the thirteenth century gave place
to pale and opalescent compositions of the
most delicate yet vivid colour, and this
bright adornment spread itself over shafts
and walls and vault until the whole interior
became a jewel-box of colour and beaten
gold.

[i73]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

It was the gayest of all gay styles, flaunt-
ing all the glittering pageantry of chivalry,
and expressing in perfect form the luxury
and the ease and the pride of life that just
preceded the Reformation. A great style,
though narrow in its scope and secular
rather than religious, it imposed itself on
England to such a degree that it became the
only possible style, and it produced not
alone such positive works of genius as the
cloister of Gloucester and its Lady Chapel,
the vaults of Oxford Cathedral and Sher-
borne, King's College Chapel and that of
Henry VII at Westminster, but as well a
bewildering galaxy of town and country
churches. England was growing rich and
full of plenty: her people were still free
citizens, there was as yet no proletariat and
no capitalism, the monasteries had not been
suppressed, and in spite of the Wars of the
Roses and the Black Death, there was
greater wealth, more justly distributed, than
anywhere else in the world. It was " Mer-
rie England " in truth, and the general con-
tent and prosperity showed themselves in
an incredible amount of building, both re-
ligious and secular, and the embellishing of
the old sanctuaries with a fabulous wealth
[i74]

DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM

of altars, chantries, screens, tombs, chapels,
porches, sculptures, and decorations. It is
a pity so little of all this exquisite embel-
lishment has remained. Within a century
the major part was beaten into dust, melted
into bullion, or sold for building-stones and
old metal by the dull-witted and rapacious
servants of Henry VIII; and later came
" the tiger's cub " Edward VI, Elizabeth,
the Puritans, and the nineteenth century.
We are thankful for what we have, but its
strange beauty makes us hopelessly covetous
of the inestimable treasures we have lost.

Toward the end architecture itself hard-
ened a little and lost its spontaneous gaiety
and its delicate f ancifulness, but in domestic
building and in the country churches it con-
tinued to the very end. Abbot Huby's fine
tower at Fountains had only just been fin-
ished when the vast abbey was handed over
to pillage and destruction, and the same
is true of the lost Edgar Chapel at Glaston-
bury. Prior Moon's great tower at Bolton
had only risen a third of its height at the
Suppression, and I myself have found at
Fairford the patterns on the unfinished
stone, stencilled there by some sixteenth cen-
tury apprentice in preparation for the mas-
[i75]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

ter carver who was to come the next day to
begin his carving. He did not come, nor
ever will, though four centuries have passed
since word came that the spoilers were on
their way and that no more might be done
for the glory of God or for sheer joy in the
doing of beautiful things.

Gothic art did not die of inanition. When
the Reformation broke it had before it great
possibilities. Already it had begun to in-
corporate the delicate craftsmanship of
Italian sculptors, full of the new wine of
the Early Renaissance, and had the world
not been convulsed by a destructive revolu-
tion yet another page might have been
added to the annals of Christian art, which
did not die, but was incontinently slain,
that a new era and a new art might come
to birth.

After the anarchy and the awful destruc-
tion of the Reformation period had some-
what abated, and the new era begun, the old
art was gone and something entirely new
had taken its place. This is true at least
of official art, the art of the new class
of professional artists, of the constructive
agencies in Church and State, of the new
" upper classes " who were now completely
[176]

DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM

differentiated from the (also new) prole-
tariat. Amongst the peasantry and the
country folk and the minor lords and squires
the old fashion lingered on, and for a cen-
tury or more the old ways held for the
country churches (though few new ones
were needed now) , the cottages, and manors,
and minor chateaux. It was a declining in-
fluence, however; little by little the peas-
antry lost their freedom, the squires and
lords their independence, the priests their
piety, the bishops and canons their intelli-
gence, and by the end of the seventeenth
century the last vestige of Mediaeval art had
disappeared. Will you have patience with
me while I try to trace the circumstances
of this great revolution?

When the spirit of the Middle Ages
finally established itself throughout western
Europe, the last traces of paganism had dis-
appeared from religion, from philosophy,
and from the social organism. The spirit
of antiquity was that of obedience to nature
and the worship of reason, with force as
the ultima ratio. Its religion was the deifi-
cation of the attributes of nature, from lust
to power; its philosophy, the establishing of
standards and the apprehension of absolute
[i77]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

truth through process of reason; the foun-
dation of its society, slavery and the ar-
bitrament of physical force. This spirit of
antiquity which we call paganism had con-
tinued for five centuries after the Christian
Era, side by side with the new faith, and
though it had yielded here and there in re-
ligion and philosophy, it maintained itself
almost unhampered in the organization of
society, which was still definitely founded
on slavery. When the Empire broke down
in ruin, these partially submerged qualities
of paganism regained control of the West.
The first protest was on the instant, and at
the hands of St. Benedict, who led the re-
volt of those who were compelled to with-
draw from an intolerable world, under the
novel banner of Poverty, Chastity, Obedi-
ence, and Labour, the four antitheses to all
that paganism had held fundamental. For
five centuries, with most indifferent or
ephemeral results, Christianity strove to
establish its own principles over those of
paganism, and for the two following cen-
turies it waged a warfare so successful that
in the end these principles stood supreme,
if not in universal action, at least in theoret-
ical acceptance. The spirit of antiquity had
[178]

DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM

declared that there was nothing higher than
physical and human nature, except human
reason, and that by the following of nature
and reason men should become as gods.
Christianity had preached a human nature
corrupted by sin, but through the Incarna-
tion and the Atonement glorified anew and
subject to salvation through the grace of
God, and explicitly by means of the or-
dained Sacraments of the Church. The two
conceptions were built up on opposed bases
and were different in toto. The Christian
conception won, and for nearly five cen-
turies determined the nature of religion,
created an entirely new philosophy, and or-
ganized a society that had no prototype as
it has had as yet no successor of like nature.
The five elements entering into the
make-up of Medievalism were: Northern
blood, monasticism, the Catholic Faith,
Sacramental philosophy, and the Christian
commonwealth. It would be manifestly im-
possible to consider, even superficially, all
these contributing causes, though all were
operative in the production of the art we
have been considering. While, however,
the first four created the content of art and
determined its indwelling spirit, it was the
[179]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

last that was chiefly instrumental in fixing
the forms. Its complete destruction, within
a brief space of years, had more than all
else to do with the corresponding transfor-
mation of art from its Christian and Mediae-
val nature to its pagan and Renaissance (or
modern) form. For this reason, and be-
cause the Christian commonwealth is little
understood and generally misrepresented, I
must speak of it, though as briefly as
possible.

During the reconstruction of Europe
after the fall of Rome, slavery tended,
though by almost imperceptible degrees, to
disappear. With the opening of the true
Middle Ages its doom was sealed, and the
fully developed Mediaeval society founded
itself on an entirely new basis. Slavery
(domestic, industrial, and economic) had
been the universal law of antiquity, a small
group of individuals holding and control-
ling the land (that is to say, the chief means
of production), together with all other
forms of wealth and wealth-producing
power. The vast majority of men existed
by sufferance, without any personal means
of production, and were maintained and
permitted to breed simply because without
[180]

DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM

their enforced labour the potential wealth
in land, or other property, could not be
made operative. Wives and children were
chattels over whom the man frequently had
the power of life and death, while over the
labour, the persons, and the lives of the
slaves the lord had almost unrestricted
authority to do with them as he liked.

Under the Mediaeval system the old
Latin villa, or tract of land under the ab-
solute ownership of a dominus, or lord,
who worked it through his corps of slaves,
had, through the process of feudalism, and
by the ninth century, been wholly trans-
formed. The estate was now divided into
three portions, one the private property of
the lord, one reserved to the tenants who
practically though not as yet legally owned
it, the third held for the common use of
lord and yeomanry. By the twelfth cen-
tury custom had determined the nature of
the rent the peasant should pay his lord for
use of the land, and what the lord was bound
to render him in return, and by the four-
teenth century peasant ownership was prac-
tically unquestioned. He could not be
evicted from his land; it descended from
father to son, and the rent paid either in
[181]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

kind or in money or in service was a small
portion of the total possible income. This
formed the tax the peasant paid; it was
definite and limited, and no more in pro-
portion to his income than the " State,
county, town, and school tax " of today, let
alone the question of indirect taxation of
the innumerable kinds now in vogue. To
put the case in a few words, the man on
the land controlled the means of produc-
tion, whereas both before Medievalism and
after the means of production were and are
in the hands of a small group of landlords
or capitalists.

Simultaneously trade and industry were
developing along similar lines through the
guilds. These were voluntary societies,
covering all possible lines of activity, partly
co-operative, but made up of private in-
dividuals owning and controlling their own
means of production. Each body was self-
governing, and it looked out for the educa-
tion of the children of its members, gave
aid and nursing in sickness, and burial at
death. Above all it encouraged emulation
amongst its members, but checked compe-
tition, guarded their rights and the scale of
their wages, upheld the standards of work-
[182]

DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM

manship, and jealously controlled the di-
vision of profits to prevent a great share
falling into the hands of the few to the
impoverishment of the many.

During the three great centuries of the
central Middle Ages, there was neither
slavery nor a division of society between a
small group of capitalists (or owners of
the means of production), on the one hand,
and a vast proletariat made up of men dis-
possessed of the means of production on the
other. Between the lord and the yeoman
the difference was less of kind than of de-
gree, while the priesthood, monasticism, and
chivalry gave free and wide opportunities
for ability to rise, as by a natural process,
from one social scale to another, until it
was no uncommon thing for a yeoman's son
to become, on the one hand, page, squire,
knight, baron, count; on the other, novice,
monk, abbot, bishop, cardinal, and even
Pope. If democracy consists, as it does, in
abolition of privilege, and equal opportun-
ity for all, then the Middle Ages form the
only democracy of record, and if Catholi-
cism had produced nothing else it deserves
eternal honour for making this possible.

Through the guilds the same " carrier e
[183]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

ouverte aux talents " was made available,
and ability alone determined whether the
apprentice should remain such, or become
the builder of Amiens or Rheims. Through
the zealous guarding of standards, work-
manship and artistic quality progressed
steadily, and through co-operation a score
of groups of independent artists and crafts-
men worked in unison on the same building,
with the same end in view, and with no
quarrelling over precedence or the inva-
sion of each other's territory. Is it any
wonder that during the epoch of this only
Christian commonwealth art should have
flourished, and that Christian architecture
should have been what it was?

Let us now consider the great revolu-
tion whereby the Middle Ages gave way to
the Renaissance, Gothic to neo-classic, and
Christianity to a revived paganism.

In the year 1250, the central moment of
the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Empire
was dissolved. It was re-established in Ger-
many alone, and Italy lost all effective and
centralized government. From that mo-
ment anarchy began and came to its full
estate as soon as the Papacy, the last centre
of order, was removed to Avignon. No
[184]

DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM

description could do justice to the carni-
val of profligacy and crime that reigned
throughout Italy. Unscrupulous adventur-
ers seized on power by force and fraud,
extinguishing civil and moral rights and
abandoning themselves to a career of
treason, murder, treachery, poisoning, and
almost inconceivable debauchery. All
ethical standards were broken down; re-
ligion was derided, the authority of the
Church in faith and morals was scorned
and disregarded, and a complete return
made to the spirit of antiquity, in that na-
ture— human nature and reason — became
the arbiter of conduct. All the hard-won
liberties of the individual, the associations,
and the communes disappeared in a pan-
demonium of tyranny. When this new
spirit clothed itself with wealth, luxury,
magnificence, art, and the patronage of let-
ters, that it might hide its indelible blood-
stains and extinguish by its glory all
memory of its inconceivable crimes, Italy
had become, as of old, a centre of omnipo-
tent lords holding all power, all the means
of production, with a vast proletariat, dis-
possessed, impoverished, and reduced to
practical slavery.

[185]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

The return to paganism in society and
morals may have initiated, or it may simply
have synchronized with, a corresponding
return to pagan ideals in art. In any case
the return was made, and in the midst of
murder and outrage all Italy turned to the
classical remains of letters, philosophy, and
all the arts. The powerful vital force en-
gendered by Medievalism, at that very
moment beginning there fully to express
itself, was diverted into new channels, and
an unexampled artistic splendour shone
over the ruin of Christian society and the
inauguration of the new paganism; pal-
liating its crimes and almost justifying its
pretensions.

From Italy this enthralling new spirit
extended itself little by little over all Eu-
rope. It came, as it could, in fascinating
form ; and on the strength of its art, its new
learning, its lavish splendour, found ready
acceptance. At once, however, its poison
began to work, — in society, in philosophy,
and in religion. By this time the Church
itself, almost wholly in Italy, increasingly
in France and Germany, had made its sur-
render, and the power the first of the new
pagans fought furiously because of its stand
[186]

DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM

for Christian morals and Christian faith,
was now their fellow and accessory. The
monasteries held out longest against the in-
sanity of fundamental humanism, some of
them successfully, but their influence be-
came less and less, and finally almost
negligible.

The pagan revolution in Italy resulted
in the temporary abandonment of Christian
faith and morals, and in the acquisition of
all the wealth and the means of production
by a group of omnipotent assassins. In
France, while religion still held a formal
supremacy, its effectiveness was appallingly
diminished, morals degenerated, though less
fatally than in the south, but the social
revolution was quite as complete and re-
sulted through the Wars of Religion in an
equal extinguishing of Mediaeval liberty
and the mingling in the crown of all power,
all authority, and an enormous area of ter-
ritory from which the new proletariat had
been dispossessed.

In England the Renaissance came slowly,
so far as its aesthetic and literary amenities
are concerned, and its religious and philo-
sophical corollaries as well. Curiously
enough, however, the economic revolution
[187]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

made its way more rapidly. In the early
fifteenth century the great mass of English-
men owned the land on which they lived
and laboured, and all other means of pro-
duction as well. Wealth was distributed
with a close approach to evenness, and was
more abundant than in any other part of
Europe. The greatest landlord was the
Church, holding something over a quarter
of the land, but the taxes (or rents) were
low, collected with unbusinesslike leniency,
and largely established by immemorial cus-
tom and therefore subject to little change.
By the beginning of the sixteenth century
the group of landholders had begun to
increase their holdings, while the small
owners were diminishing in number. There
was little as yet that was alarming in the
change, which might easily have been ar-
rested, but at this critical moment occurred
the greatest economic disaster England has
ever known, the suppression of the monas-
teries, and the giving over of their vast lands
to the cabal of new and needy and greedy
nobles who had been called (and who had
paid) to take the place of the men of old
honour who had fallen during the Wars
of the Roses. A fourth of the wealth-
[188]

DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM

producing land of England was at a blow
handed over to a very sorry group of knaves
and sycophants, mostly of inferior blood:
tenants by tens of thousands were dispos-
sessed and driven out to starve or turn out-
law, and in ten years England had ceased
to be a Commonwealth, and had become, as
Italy and France, a nation made up of a
land-owning and wealth-controlling minor-
ity on the one hand, a proletarian and help-
less and poverty-stricken majority on the
other.

In a century the whole social fabric of
Europe had been revolutionized, and the
Mediaeval system of an approximate equal-
ity in landholding, in possession of the
means of production, and in the distribu-
tion of wealth (and therefore in opportu-
nity), had given place to the Capitalistic
State, consisting of an absolute and ever-
increasing inequality in all these elements
that form the only foundation for a just and
righteous commonwealth.

Meanwhile another series of catastrophies
had overtaken Europe in the shape of cer-
tain great wars which marked the rise and
progress of the Renaissance and Reforma-
tion, wars compared with which the mili-
[189]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

tary expeditions of Medievalism were mere
skirmishes. Their results were equally un-
like, and of a most fatal nature. During
Medievalism the nobility in every Chris-
tian country of Europe was of pure north-
ern stock, tracing its lineage back to the
hardy lands around the Baltic. So was the
great mass of the people, except in Spain,
southern France, and the lower half of
Italy, but underneath was always a sub-
stratum of the round-headed Alpine race
of which the present southern Slavs are a
part, with, in the south, a debased mixture
of many servile strains. The Crusades and
the wars of Medievalism had cut into the
noble and peasant classes of northern blood
in about equal proportions, but now some-
thing very different was to occur, and this
was a series of wide and long-drawn-out
conflicts in which the men of the purest
blood and best traditions and highest men-
tality were practically exterminated.

The Wars of the Roses, the Thirty Years'
War in Germany, the Wars of Religion in
France and Flanders, and, later, the reli-
gious persecutions in England, with the
wars of the Commonwealth, struck pri-
marily at the class of nobles, knights, and
[190]

DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM

gentlemen, and secondarily at the yeomanry
of northern blood, so planing away all the
wonderful superstructure of culture, char-
acter, and chivalry, and releasing the low-
est strata of all, which came swiftly to the
top, and, with no traditions of culture,
character, or chivalry, assumed to fill the
depleted ranks.

Of the Thirty Years' War in Germany
and its results on the race and society,
Madison Grant says:

" It destroyed an entire generation, tak-
ing each year for thirty years the finest
manhood of the nation. Two-thirds of the
population of Germany was destroyed in
some states, such as Bohemia; while out of
500,000 people in Wurttemberg there were
only 48,000 left at the end of the war. . . .
From that time on the purely Teutonic race
in Germany has been largely replaced by
the Alpine type in the south and the Wend-
ish and Polish types in the east. . . . Out
of 70,000,000 inhabitants of the German
Empire only 9,000,000 are purely Teutonic.
. . . In addition the Thirty Years' War
virtually destroyed the land-owning yeo-
manry and lesser gentry formerly found in
Germany as numerously as in France or in
[191]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

England. . . . This section of the popula-
tion was largely exterminated, and the class
of gentlemen practically vanishes from Ger-
man history from that time on. When the
Thirty Years' War was over there remained
in Germany nothing except the brutalized
peasantry, and the high nobility which
turned from the toils of endless warfare to
mimic on a small scale the Court of Ver-
sailles. Today the ghastly rarity in the
German armies of chivalry and generosity
toward women and of knightly protection
and courtesy toward the prisoners and
wounded can be largely attributed to this
annihilation of the gentle class. The Ger-
mans of today, whether they live on the
farms or in the cities, are for the most part
descendants of the peasants who survived,
not of the brilliant knights and hardy foot
soldiers who fell in that mighty conflict."

The result of the wars of the fifteenth,
the sixteenth, and the seventeenth centuries
in France and England was less terribly
comprehensive, but the same in nature. All
the fine flower of Mediaeval culture was
swept away; debased and adulterated stock
came to the surface and ruthlessly gathered
the power and the means of production into
[192]

DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM

its own hands. The hold of religion was
gone, the monasteries suppressed, the cus-
toms and relationships of feudal society
superseded by force and by class legislation,
and at the very moment of complete success
came the great industrial discoveries of coal
and iron as potentialities of wealth, whose
infinite possibilities had been unlocked by
the solving of the problem of steam as
manageable energy. One invention fol-
lowed another, with endless new discov-
eries, each of which might be given an in-
dustrial application. The proletariat, made
out of the free citizens of a dead Mediaeval-
ism, could not use them, but the new class
of capitalists made out of the up springing
dregs of a dead civilization, could and did,
now that all restraining influences had been
removed, and since they were the holders
of all wealth and all wealth-producing
agencies. The result was Industrial Civi-
lization, of which Alfred Russell Wal-
lace could write, in the year before the
War:

" It is not too much to say that our whole

system of society is rotten from top to

bottom, and the Social Environment as a

whole, in relation to our possibilities and

[193]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

our claims, is the worst that the world has
ever seen."

I have called this, my last lecture, " The
Decadence and the New Paganism." I
have apologized for using the word " deca-
dence " as applied to the latest architecture
of Medievalism, but I have no apologies
to make for applying the words " new
paganism " to the scheme of life that took
the place of that of the great five centuries
of Christian civilization. Do not misun-
derstand me: I do not claim for Mediae-
val society any degree of perfection. The
most constructive student of the time Amer-
ica has yet produced, Henry Osborne Tay-
lor, has written of what he calls " the
spotted actuality." It was " spotted," min-
gled of good and evil, as are all peoples,
all generations, all men, and as these must
be mingled of good and evil for all time.
I do declare the thesis, however, that it was
a time when the principles of Christianity
were the dominant and controlling force,
and when the " spotted actuality " contained
a. greater proportion of good than has been
recorded in history either before or since.

The new paganism was in religion, in
philosophy, in sociology, in economics, in
[ 194]

DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM

ethics, and in art, a definite and categorical
return to the old paganism. It is argued,
and may be debatable, that such a return
was an evidence of human evolution toward
something higher and more wholesome than
Christianity could afford. It may be so, but
the eternal antithesis must be recognized
and men must now admit that society can
no longer continue half Christian and half
pagan. With more than exemplary patience
Christianity has surrendered one position
after another in the vain effort to affect a
compromise and maintain a working basis
with the universal force that re-entered the
world just five centuries ago. The result
is now for us to see in the elapsed years of
the twentieth century, made clear and un-
mistakable by the events that have cast the
red light of their apocalyptic revelation
over the delusive present, ever since the
first day of August in the year of Our
Lord, One Thousand Nine Hundred and
Fourteen.

There remain for us only a few words as
to the workings of this new paganism in the
architecture that in seven centuries had
grown from the hesitating efforts of Charle-
magne's clumsy builders to the awful maj-
[195]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

esty of Chartres, the kindly and human and
beautiful Lincoln, the serene consummation
of Rheims. It was at first a stimulus, for
the high ardour of Medievalism was still
there, and it used the delicacy and the craft
and the pleasant fancy of the earliest Renais-
sance to give a new charm to its own im-
aginings. Then came the division of society
between capitalist and proletarian, the con-
centration of wealth and the means to
wealth in a few hands, the dissolution of
the guilds, the suppression of the monas-
teries, the restoration of tyranny and abso-
lutism in government, the moral apostasy
of the Church. Intellectualism took the
place of conscience and Revelation; indi-
vidualism destroyed liberty and co-opera-
tion, and all the mainsprings of communal
art were dried up.

For the art of the Middle Ages was a
communal art, and in this may lie the secret
of its character. It grew from the spon-
taneous demand of a whole people under
the influence of a great and vital impulse.
No beneficent millionaire, no Brahmin of
superior taste, no august and official acad-
emy, no suddenly enriched middle class
with social ambitions gave the call or dic-
[196]

DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM

tated the forms or the fashions they would
patronize. There were no architects as
such, and no contractors; no vast and effi-
cient building organizations on the one
hand, or industrious walking delegates on
the other. No man stood by himself on a
pinnacle of superiority and by competitive
bids chose the cheapest workmen, dictated
to them what they should do, and, subject
to the veto of the labour unions, saw that
they did it. Mediaeval architecture was the
work of free, proud, independent artists and
craftsmen, working together, each in his own
sphere, and all to the common end of pro-
ducing something better and more beauti-
ful than had ever been seen before.

The moment the Early Renaissance be-
came the Pagan Renaissance, all this was
changed. The new art was the appanage
of the specialist: the people as a whole did
not like it or want it, the craftsmen knew
nothing about it and cared less. From its
very nature it excluded personal artistry
and individual initiative, and nothing re-
mained, if the work was to be accomplished,
but the invention of the architect. He was
invented out of the amateurs and dilettanti
of the literary circles of Italy and began
[197]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

his career of designing, controlling, direct-
ing every branch of an art that in its great
days was not the result of an aesthetic fiat,
but of the co-operation of as many artists
as there were arts, as many craftsmen as
there were crafts. The guilds dissolved,
craftsmanship died of disuse, classical de-
tails, carefully drawn for day labourers to
cut, worked their way fantastically into the
lingering Gothic compositions, crowded
them out, and established themselves as the
exclusive claimants to the admiration of the
elect.

And still the old inheritance of good taste
and the love of beauty and joy in craftsman-
ship lingered here and there: the real and
fine principles of the old classic architec-
ture worked through the silly admiration
of superficial forms and built up a new style
that often reached levels of great majesty
and distinguished beauty. But it was now
a new style, and could only be this in com-
mon honesty, for the life and thought to
which it gave expression were equally
new. It is inconceivable that the art of the
Middle Ages could have continued to voice
the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the
Revolution, and to give outward shape to
[198]

DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM

the spirit of the Capitalistic and Industrial
State which is the synthesis of these, the
solar plexus of modernism. Gothic art had
done its work; it had given immortal form
to Christian civilization, and it passed with
the splendid thing it had so faithfully
served. It can never come back, at least
with the life and power that were its own.
Haltingly restored it may serve well as the
visible protest of the Church and the uni-
versity against their eternal enemy, the new
paganism. Whether its spirit comes back,
to express, in some new series of forms, the
righteous and eternal forces that made the
Mediaeval man and the Mediaeval State,
depends on the answer the world gives to
the great question propounded by the War.
We have had our chance and have made
of it — what we have made. Modern civi-
lization has now reached that impasse from
which the way of escape is apparently by
way of war. Revolution follows close; it
may be that the war itself will merge in
revolution with no military termination that
finds its position in a treaty of peace, while
the inevitable process of overturning the
entire economic and industrial basis of so-
ciety supersedes a war of armed forces and
[199]

THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC

brings in the more terrible contest of classes
and of systems. No prediction is plausible
except that, whether now or later, the revo-
lution is not to be escaped and that in the
end all we have known as modern civiliza-
tion will have passed and a new era have
come into being.

The new paganism has had its era of five
centuries and no definite epoch has ever
lasted beyond this period. The end is very
close at hand; whether the next step is into
five centuries of Dark Ages or into a new
era of five centuries of a restored Chris-
tian commonwealth, depends on us. The
choice is free; we are not constrained in our
decision, but on that decision hangs the hap-
piness or misery, the honour or the shame,
the righteousness or the apostasy of the
world. Men rejected Christian civiliza-
tion for the new paganism once, when the
choice was offered them. Will they now
in turn reject their former choice that the
Christian commonwealth may be restored?

[200]

The ^Mythology of^All traces

AN ILLUSTRATED WORK
OF RESEARCH

Editor
LOUIS HERBERT GRAY, A.M., Ph.D.

Late Associate Editor of Hastings' s Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics

Consulting Editor
GEORGE FOOT MOORE, A.M., D.D., LL.D.

Harvard University

I CLASSICAL . . William Sherwood Fox, Ph.D., Princeton University

II TEUTONIC . . Axel Olrik, Ph.D., University of Copenhagen
(CELTIC . . . Canon John A. MacCulloch, D.D., Bridge of Allan,

III j Scotland

( SLAVIC . . . Jan Machal, Ph.D., Bohemian University, Prague

IV FINNO-UGRIC, Uno Holmberg, Ph.D., University of Finland, Hel-

SIBERIAN . singfors

V SEMITIC. . . R. Campbell Thompson, M. A., F.S. A., F.R.G.S.,

Oxford, England

HNDIAN ... A. Berriedale Keith, D.C.L., D.Litt., Edinburgh
. J University

I IRANIAN . . . Albert J. Carnoy, Ph.D., Litt. D., University of
V Louvain

( ARMENIAN . . Mardiros Ananikian, B.D., Kennedy School of
VII } Missions, Hartford

( AFRICAN . . Alice Werner, L.L.A. (St. Andrews)} School of

Oriental Studies, London

CHINESE . . . U. Hattori, Litt.D., University of Tokyo, Tokyojapan
JAPANESE . . Masaharu Anesaki, Litt.D., University of Tokyo,
Tokyo, Japan

IX OCEANIC . . Roland Burrage Dixon, Ph.D., Harvard University

X NORTH AMERICAN Hartley Burr Alexander, Ph.D., University of Nebr.

XI AMERICAN (Latin) Hartley Burr Alexander, Ph.D., University of Nebr.
Xj, ( EGYPT . . . W. Max Miiller, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

| INDO-CHINESE . Sir (James) George Scott, K.C.I.E., London
XIII INDEX . . . Louis Herbert Gray, A.M., Ph.D.

Sample pages sent on request

Sold in sets only. $6.00 per volume in buckram

$10.00 per volume in half morocco

MARSHALL JONES COMPANY, Publishers
212 Summer Street, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

•fe^B^M

HOME USE

All BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS

DyEAS^TAMPEDBELOW

RECC1RC DEC 0 9

FORM N0. DD6, "^^^

LD 2lA-60m-4 '64
(E4555slO)476B

Universitv o/V^i"nfAM2.

DC. BERKELEY LIBRARIES